HQ ESC/HRK, 5 Eglin St. (Building 1704), Hanscom AFB, MA 01731-2116

A -- MULTIDIMENSIONAL AND GIGABIT INTERNETWORKS POC Mr. Charles J. Shank, 617-377-9365; Major Dale V. Hawley, Contracting Officer, 617-377-6797; Alloria Harris, Negotiator, 617-377-3847. The Electronic Systems Center (AFMC) is planning to award a sole source contract to the University of Kansas for Research, Inc., an educational institution, for phase II of the Multidimensional Applications and Gigabit Internetwork Consortium (MAGIC) project, which will be called MAGIC II. This contract action is for services for which the government intends to solicit and negotiate with only one source under the authority of FAR 6.302-1. The contract type will be cost reimbursement no fee, for a 36 month period of performance. The estimated cost is $4,800,000. Interested persons may identify their interest and capability to respond to the requirements. Qualification packages should be forwarded by mail to ESC/ENK, 5 Eglin St., Hanscom AFB, MA 01731-2116, ATTN: Ms Alloria Harris, (617)377-3847, no later than 15 days after the publication date of this announcement (See numbered Note 22 at FAR 5.207(e)(3)). MAGIC II is a continuation of an effort completed in Dec 1995 that established and managed a high-speed heterogeneous, wide-area IP/ATM network and distribution storage system that was used to facilitate the testing and evaluation of a variety of applications. In phase I the MAGIC team successfully demonstrated the network by implementing an interactive terrain visualization application. A number of performance issues related to high speed networks were resolved and techniques developed to eliminate many performance problems. MAGIC II will expand on the results of phase I by creating a larger research testbed, introducing wireless access, increasing the number of networked-based storage devices, implementing dynamic system configuration for locating data sources, and developing data fusion and visualization techniques that enable the real-time fusion differenct kinds of data sets. The network constructed under the phase I will be used for MAGIC II. The original MACIC contracts were awarded to the University of Kansas, SRI International, and the Minnesota Supercomputing Center based on results of a competitive selection under BAA 91-16, issued by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Contractors interested in MAGIC II must have the ability to provide the foundations for large-scale geographically distributed computing on a dynamically changing mix of heterogenous computing platforms and resources, develop a 3D terrain visualization application that can process raw imagery data in near-real-time, that can accept, fuse, and display imagery from a variety of sources, and that can interface to geographically distributed workstations for distributed processing and distributed paralled storage and retrieval of data, including very large (100 Gbyte) data sets, develop techniques for dynamic adaptation of applications to the state of the network; develop software, including reliable ATM signaling, for constructing large IP/ATM internetworks; and produce and analyze integrated measurements of the performance of all system components, including the terrain visualization application, the distributed storage system and the communications protocols. To support this research, the contractor must be able to quickly provide the following communications facilities and equipment at no cost the the government; acces to, and the experiental use of, a SONET OC-48 backbone wide area network with OC-12 access links, including an OC-12 link to the Earth Resources Observation System Data Center in Sioux Falls, SD and an OC-3 link to Ft. Leavenworthk KS two prototype ATM wireless base stations and transportable user terminals with access to the backbone; and one or more ATM premises switches with OC-12 interfaces. The contractor must be able to interconnect the backbone with other existing or planned ATM networks to create a large-scale internet that will be used to test and verifty the scaling and the performance of the application and the communications software across multiple administrative domains. Specifically excluded is research which primarily results in evolutionary improvement to the existing state of practice or focuses on a specific system or hardware solution. (0108)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0002 19960418\A-0002.SOL)