IARPA seeks industry feedback on MIST BAA

On February 27, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity posted a draft broad agency announcement for the Molecular Information Storage (MIST) program. Industry feedback is due by March 15.

This BAA (IARPA-BAA-18-03) is for the Molecular Information Storage (MIST) Program.  IARPA is seeking innovative solutions for the MIST Program in this BAA.  The MIST Program is envisioned to begin in late 2018.

The fundamental aim of the MIST program is to develop deployable storage technologies that can eventually scale into the exabyte regime and beyond with reduced physical footprint, power and cost requirements relative to conventional storage technologies. MIST seeks to accomplish this by using sequence-controlled polymers as a data storage medium, and by building the necessary devices and information systems to interface with this medium. Technologies are sought to optimize the writing and reading of information to/from polymer media at scale, and to support random access of information from polymer media archives at scale.

Innovative solutions are sought under this BAA and are anticipated to range across a diversity of domains, including chemistry, molecular biology, microfluidics, semiconductor engineering and computer science. Example approaches to writing data may include, but are not limited to, performing massively parallel chemical synthesis of polymers on microfabricated chips. Example approaches to reading data may include, but are not limited to, sequencing polymers using arrays of nanopore sensors. Example approaches to random access may include, but are not limited to, using key-value stores in conjunction with a physical compartmentalization of molecular media by data type.

Full information is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps