14 DAY TRIAL // 135$ million is the sum speculated for the new bi-continental alliance, that will develop new networking technology for military defense, according to Cnet.
Funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.K. Ministry of Defense, the alliance puts IBM in front of a consortium of 24 academic and technology partners. The goal is to improve the secure communication networks between UK and US.
Called International Technology Alliance (ITA) in Network and Information Sciences, it includes Boeing, Honeywell, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University and Imperial College of London. The research will circle the headquarters of all the partners.
ITA brings together the scientific community on both sides of the Atlantic to share knowledge and develop forward-thinking technologies, such as sensor and RFID networks", said Thomas Killion, chief scientist of the U.S. Army Lab. "It is really as much about partnering with our closest ally as it is about addressing critical research challenges in network and information sciences that will enable us to foster next-generation tactical mobile networks."
Also, Dinesh Verma, program manager of ITA (and an IBM researcher), said "the research will delve into four scientific topics: network theory; security across a system of systems; sensor information processing and delivery; and distributed coalition planning and decision making. Projects include building out a RFID network so that the sensors could transmit data wirelessly to each other and a centralized database, which could be accessed by authorized military, for example. Another project is focused on policy-based security--which is aimed at creating new techniques and software to disseminate high-level security orders to lower-level operations with ease. After a few years of research, the alliance plans to produce a new type of networked management system that is self-managing and self-organizing, adding that it could be commercialized for corporate use, too. The alliance also hopes to plot a blueprint of how best to collaborate in a far-reaching consortium of this type." He concluded: "This is the largest consortium I know of that is conducting research into these areas and at this magnitude."
This happened after IBM has won the contract for the Los Alamos National Laboratory's new supercomputer -the Roadrunner- which will be the world's fastest machine and which is designed to sustain a performance level of a "petaflop" (1 quadrillion calculations per second), and after it recently announced the takeover of ISS, for about $1.3 billion.
It seems that big numbers are orbiting around IBM these days, and I can hardly wait to see what they have in store for the future.