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Technology giant Intel Corporation announced the formation of a wholly owned subsidiary, Intel Federal, to provide strategic focus in order to better address new opportunities in working with the U.S. government. Initially, Intel Federal will focus on the high-performance computing segment, including work on exascale computing with the U.S. Department of Energy and other agencies. In time, the subsidiary will be open to working with all branches of the government, the company said in a release.
Intel also announced that Dave Patterson has been appointed as president of Intel Federal. Patterson brings an array of experience to this role, most recently as president and CEO of Optelecom-NKF, and prior to that as president and CEO of Siemens Government Services (SGS). Patterson will report directly to Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s data center and connected systems group.
“Reaching supercomputer performance levels of a hundred times more powerful than today by 2018 will require the combined efforts of both industry and government. An ExaFlop supercomputer’s performance is the equivalent of every person on Earth making about 150 million calculations per second. We look forward to collaborating more closely with the U.S. government on future supercomputing challenges,” said Skaugen. “The creation of Intel Federal demonstrates the strategic importance of these programs and will give us the ability to establish and maintain the unique processes, procedures and controls needed to develop and manage programs with the government.”
Initially Intel Federal will have offices in Oregon, California and the Washington, D.C. area. Over time, Intel Federal will expand its focus to a wide variety of other programs within the government, the company said. Earlier this year, Intel announced a $30 million investment in two new research centers that will focus on cloud computing and embedded technology and is the latest in a string of facilities that are run in conjunction with academic institutions.
The new centers, announced Aug. 3, are part of a larger plan outlined by Intel Labs executives in January to invest $100 million to create Intel Science and Technology Centers-or ISTCs-headquartered at various universities throughout 2011, focusing on a wide range of areas. Both will be housed at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., with which Intel already has a close relationship.
Stanford University was the first site for such a center, with a focus on visual computing. In June, Intel Labs opened a second one, focusing on secure computing, at the University of California-Berkeley. The goal of the centers is to collaborate with the schools to create technological advances that can be used, not only by Intel, but others throughout the industry. The ISTCs use open IP models, and the research results will become publically available through technical publications and open-source software releases, according to Intel officials.