Perspecta Labs lands $37M defense contract

Chantilly-based federal contractor Perspecta Inc. announced Tuesday that its research arm, Perspecta Labs, has landed a $37 million contract to develop network hardware to speed up complex computing applications for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

Perspecta will work on DARPA’s Fast Network Interface Cards program with a goal to accelerate — by 100 times the speed — applications such as the distributed training of machine learning classifiers, which are implemented through algorithms. The company will complete research and design and develop network interface hardware that operates at a faster speed.

“Perspecta Labs will leverage its expertise in networking, systems and distributed computing to provide an innovative, secure solution to the FastNICs challenge,” Perspecta Labs CEO Petros Mouchtaris said in a statement. “We are looking forward to working closely with our DARPA customer to deliver hundredfold improvements for demanding mission critical applications.”

The company will also design and implement new software including resource managers, application programming interfaces and programming tools to allow applications to operate at the improved speed. 

Perspecta employs more than 14,000 workers and won several big federal contracts last year, including an $824 million, five-year deal with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and a $657 million extension on its Next Generation Enterprise Services (NGEN) contract to continue IT services for the U.S. Department of the Navy. In April, Perspecta Labs won a $14.5 million U.S. Army contract to use machine learning to develop a suite of capabilities for the Army to protect against cyberattacks.

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