IARPA to host Proposers’ Day for MIST program

On January 24, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity announced a Proposers’ Day for the MIST program, in anticipation of a new solicitation.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) will host a Proposers’ Day Conference for the MIST program on February 21, 2018 in anticipation of the release of a new solicitation. The Conference will be held from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM EST in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The purpose of the conference will be to provide information on MIST and the research problems the program aims to address, to address questions from potential proposers, and to provide a forum for potential proposers to present their capabilities for teaming opportunities.

This announcement serves as a pre-solicitation notice and is issued solely for information and planning purposes. The Proposers’ Day Conference does not constitute a formal solicitation for proposals or proposal abstracts. Conference attendance is voluntary and is not required to propose to future solicitations (if any) associated with this program. IARPA will not provide reimbursement for any costs incurred to participate in this Proposers’ Day.

The scale and complexity of the world’s “big data” problems are increasing rapidly. Use cases that require storage and random access from exabytes of mostly unstructured data are now well-established in the private sector and are of increasing relevance to the public sector. However, meeting these requirements poses extraordinary logistical and financial challenges: today’s exabyte-scale data centers occupy large warehouses, consume megawatts of power, and cost billions of dollars to build, operate and maintain over their lifetimes. This resource intensive model does not offer a tractable path to scaling beyond the exabyte regime in the future.

The goal 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.

Full information is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps