By Ellen McCarthy
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Last month, the techies at Georgetown University embarked on a rather ambitious mission: curing cancer.
Well, not curing it, perhaps, but helping those who are on the trail of a cure work more closely together by creating a super-network linking 50 cancer institutes spread throughout the country.
Georgetown's seven-person A dvanced Research Computing center was hired by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to help build the Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG, a project researchers hope will advance cancer treatment over the next 10 years and reduce cancer-related deaths.
Georgetown's involvement came through ARC's expertise in grid computing -- a capability the liberal arts university is hoping will become one of its marquee technology specializations. Grid computing is a relatively new form of networking that links computer systems in different geographic areas to increase their power and allow more users to have access to information.
ARC director Steve Moore and other technologists say grid computing has the potential to transform the operations of industries such as manufacturing and the military by eliminating barriers to collaboration among people stationed in different offices. To promote the technology, ARC also created a Web portal to track grid-related projects around the world.
ARC was founded in 2000 to help Georgetown's scientists with research that requires extensive computation, such as the analysis of molecular behavior. Through one of Georgetown's biomedical scientists, Cathy H. Wu , ARC's directors were introduced to NCI's leaders, who awarded Georgetown an $810,000 contract to help with the caBIG initiative.
ARC's work entails converting systems at the 50 cancer centers to a common platform, so the gene mutations being studied in Texas can be shared with researchers in Massachusetts, for instance. Until now, the collaboration between the cancer centers was limited, said Peter Covitz , director of core infrastructure at the NCI's Center for Bioinformatics , partly because it could take months for scientists to swap data.
Moore said the caBIG contract has given credence to ARC's grid work and has given his team new motivation.
"We're working on what is arguably the most important bioinformatics project the federal government has ever undertaken," he said.
If you ask Col. Fred Coppola , a U.S. Army officer stationed at Fort Belvoir, he'll acknowledge that things didn't go perfectly on the battlefields of Iraq, technically speaking.
"We really outran our information and technology," Coppola said. "All of a sudden, these systems our commanders had been relying on no longer worked, and that was just bad."
As bad as it was for Coppola's troops, his words rang with opportunity for the crowd of technology contractors listening to the colonel's assessment Tuesday morning at the Washington Convention Center.
More than 7,00o tech professionals and military procurement officials convened this week at TechNet , the annual conference of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association . The event is one of the oldest conferences for military contractors (this was its 59th year), and also one of the most important, said Miriam F. Browning , a principal at McLean-based Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.
If deals aren't quite hammered out on the trade show floor, Browning said, the seeds of contracts-to-come are certainly planted. It's where contracting executives polish their relationships with the folks behind the Pentagon's purse strings and check out the wares of partners and competitors.
The take-home message from TechNet this year is that -- because of issues like the one Coppola highlighted -- there is plenty of room for improvement in the military's networks.
The Pentagon is relying on private industry to help revamp its communication systems so the right information is available to the right person at the right time -- a push to create what military officials refer to as "network-centric" operations. The initiative calls for, among other things, the creation of a network that will allow service members from different branches of the military to access data from each other.
After a presentation on the initiative, Debra M. Filippi , a program director for the Defense Information Systems Agency , was asked if the Pentagon was open to suggestions from contractors. "There is always room for new ideas and new players," she responded. By the time Filippi stepped down from the podium, the line waiting to slip her a business card and make a fast pitch was 10 deep.
It looks as if things are picking up for ObjectVide o , the Reston video-surveillance company. Sales of ObjectVideo's software haven't boomed the way the firm's investors had hoped, but last week the company said that it was awarded a $3.2 million development contract with the Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency and that today it will add a big name to its board of directors. ObjectVideo's executives are no doubt counting on their new director, Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart , who served as commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), to bring in a few more government dollars.
Overheard:
"My second day as CEO, I said, 'Let's act bigger than we are on occasion,' and that has really captured people's imaginations," Kenneth C. Dahlberg , chief executive of Science Applications International Corp. told a crowd of 400 yesterday morning at a Northern Virginia Technology Council event. That's getting harder to do: The privately held SAIC has added 20,000 employees in the past five years -- pushing its total head count above 42,000.
Ellen McCarthy writes about the local tech scene every Thursday. Her e-mail address ismccarthye@washpost.com.