The Defense Department’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) last Thursday issued a solicitation for commercial solutions for ruggedized hardware kits that have the computing capabilities, storage, network readiness, and low latency for distributed operations in austere, joint environments.
“Established DoD capabilities can be improved through the rapid integration of commercial technologies that enable a data transport-agnostic, partner and joint-ready, next-generation coordinated battlespace visualization network,” DIU says in the Frontier Node (Tactical Compute Kits) solicitation.
DIU wants the data across the distributed nodes and a government cloud environment to be synchronized, and each node must have enough storage and compute to “enable command/control and enclaved operations under degraded backhaul conditions.”
Partial or complete solutions can be submitted, but ultimately DIU wants vendors to “demonstrate utility of the prototyped solution to achieve successful completion.” Responses are due by Feb. 26.