CSC (NYSE: CSC) announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration awarded them with a Research and Development High Performance Computing System indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quality (IDIQ) contract.
The estimated contract value is $317 million if all options are exercised. It has a four-year base period, one four-year option and one one-year transition.
NOAA will fund the first year with $49.3 million using funds from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which President Barack Obama signed into a law on Feb. 17, 2009.
According to Recovery.gov, this law seeks to do three things: “create new jobs and save the existing ones, spur economic activity and invest in long term growth, and foster unprecedented levels of accountabilities and transparency in government spending.”
CSC will use the task order funds to design and employ a new high performance computing system to support NOAA’s environmental modeling program.
NOAA’s EMP is part of their Modeling, Observations and Infrastructure Sub-goal. “EMP provides model and model-based estimates of current and future states (at all time scales) of the Earth environment using scientifically based modeling techniques, ” according to NOAA’s Program Charter for Environmental Modeling.
NOAA plans to use this new system to improve global and regional climate model accuracy and advance weather forecasting abilities vital to life and property protection.
“We are proud to work with NOAA in helping the nation better understand how the Earth’s climate is changing, which will aid in the development of adaptation and mitigation strategies, ” Mike Gaffney, president of the Civil and Health Services Group, said. “CSC is confident that with the new high performance computing facility, NOAA will be able to produce more accurate and agile models and share computing resources across the agency and its research partners.”
