Intel Creates Subsidiary To Manage Government Business

Intel left the military aerospace business in the early 1990's, because of low order volume and low returns, and has not sold directly to the federal government since that time, said a spokesperson for Intel during an interview with CRN.

When Intel decided to return to working with the U.S. government, the requirements for federal contracts dictated the need for the subsidiary.

"There is a whole range of capabilities you need to be able to demonstrate in order to do business with the federal government, and we don't have all of them with Intel at the corporation level," said the spokesperson. "But as we look at the landscape we see there are some places we want to get involved with the federal government again, so we created this subsidiary."

The first focus for Intel Federal is high performance computing (HPC). The company identified opportunities within the U.S. Department of Energy, where exascale computing is a goal.

Exascale computing requires performance of one million trillion calculations (flops) per second -- an exponential increase over the petascale performance in the world's fastest super computers today. Intel Federal allows Intel to bid on projects like the Department of Energy's exascale efforts, further extending the reach of a new supercomputing architecture Intel unveiled in June.

“Reaching supercomputer performance levels of a hundred times more powerful than today by 2018 will require the combined efforts of both industry and government," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s datacenter and connected systems group, in a statement. "An ExaFlop supercomputer’s performance is the equivalent of every person on Earth making about 150 million calculations per second. We look forward to collaborating more closely with the U.S. government on future supercomputing challenges.”

Over time, Intel Federal intends to work with additional government agencies on various projects. "We initially will be focused on HPC, but wouldn't rule out other things like embedded control systems," said the Intel spokesperson, who added that cloud computing is an area of expertise within Intel that could possibly be leveraged for a government contract.

Intel Federal appointed Dave Patterson as president. Patterson previously served as president and CEO of Siemens Government Services Inc. and most recently as president and CEO of Optelecom-NKF Inc. He is currently the only employee of Intel Federal but will look to grow the team, create processes and establish an office in Washington D.C. in the near future, the spokesperson said.