By a vote of 86-8, the Senate voted to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (S. 1790) which includes funding to accelerate artificial intelligence solutions within the Defense Innovation Unit, enhancing cybersecurity, and cloud capabilities. […]

Professional services company, Accenture, has won a blanket purchase order agreement contract – worth a potential $2 billion – from the Department of Energy (DOE), according to a news release on the company’s website.

On Tuesday, the Department of Energy (DoE) announced that it would be providing $40 million in funding for research into developing algorithms and software for quantum computers.

The Department of Energy (DoE) and Intel announced today that they will team up to deliver the first supercomputer with a performance of one exaFLOP–“to a ‘quintillion’ floating point computations per second”–in the United States.

On Tuesday, the House Committee on Homeland Security convened for a hearing on securing U.S. surface transportation from cyberattacks.

Max Everett, CIO at the Department of Energy (DoE), said Thursday he was “optimistic” about the agency’s progress on a host of IT issues, including network architecture, cloud adoption, data governance standards, and cybersecurity.

The Senate on Wednesday passed the Securing Energy Infrastructure Act, which would appropriate $10 million to create a pilot program to look at nondigital control systems and how to protect them against cyber attacks.  

The Senate on Dec. 13 approved by unanimous consent HR 6227, the National Quantum Initiative Act, which would create a Federal program to speed quantum research and development “for the economic and national security” of the United States.

Federal CIO Suzette Kent revealed today that the new draft Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) policy will be released next week, and that new policies on data and automation are coming in 2019.

New guidance for the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) will likely include revised performance goals for agencies, revised metrics for energy metering and virtualization, and new metrics for under-utilized servers, availability, and old hardware, said Jake Wooley, IT sustainability program manager at the Department of Energy (DoE), during MeriTalk’s 2018 Data Center Brainstorm.

The Department of Energy Office of Inspector General released a report on Oct. 19 that found several weaknesses in the cybersecurity program at DoE in fiscal year 2018, including recurring issues in vulnerability management, patching, and formal cybersecurity training policies.

Department of Energy (DoE) CIO Max Everett said the agency’s Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) project is helping to align the activities of DoE’s wide range of labs and offices, and that the TMF process has helped DoE learn to prioritize all of its future IT projects around cost efficiency and business case.

The Department of Energy’s new office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) has already begun work to provide support to the nation’s energy grid and critical infrastructure cybersecurity, and the head of the new office appeared in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Thursday to discuss the role of CESER within DoE.

Funding needed for further U.S. research and development of quantum information sciences (QIS) and the computing and other advances that QIS is expected to yield, along with the pressing need to develop a highly skilled workforce to leverage those expected advances, dominated discussion today at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee examining the Department of Energy’s (DoE) efforts in the QIS field.

Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., is pressing major electric utility companies for details about whether and when their systems have been penetrated by Russian-affiliated hackers, and at the same time is querying several Federal agencies about what they are doing to help utilities recognize and prevent attempts to break into their networks and control systems.

Various arms of the Federal government are grappling with how to best curb critical infrastructure risk despite uncertainty regarding the best path forward and knowledge barriers surrounding the underlying technology.

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk.

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk.

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk.

Lawmakers hailed a new partnership that will leverage the Department of Energy’s high-performance computing and machine learning capabilities to help analyze the health records of more than 20 million veterans maintained by the Department of Veterans Affairs.