Intel Corp. on Tuesday announced the formation of a wholly owned subsidiary, Intel Federal LLC, to provide strategic focus in order to better address new opportunities in working with the U.S. government. Initially Intel Federal will focus on the high performance computing (HPC) segment, including work on exascale computing with the U.S. department of energy and other agencies.

“Reaching supercomputer performance levels of a hundred times more powerful than today by 2018 will require the combined efforts of both industry and government. 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,” said Kirk Skaugen vice president and general manager of Intel’s datacenter and connected systems group.

Intel needs the new subsidiary to enable closer collaboration between itself and governmental organizations, something which requires certain levels of secrecy, confidentiality and so on. In general, this means that the company intends to create unique technological solutions that should remain secret.

Intel also announced that Dave Patterson has been appointed as president of Intel Federal LLC. Patterson brings an extensive array of experience to this role, most recently as president and CEO of Optelecom-NKF, and prior to that as president and CEO of Siemens Government Services (SGS). Mr. Patterson will report directly to Mr. Skaugen.

“The creation of Intel Federal demonstrates the strategic importance of these programs and will give us the ability to establish and maintain the unique processes, procedures and controls needed to develop and manage programs with the government,” added Mr. Skaugen.

Initially Intel Federal will have offices in Oregon, California and the Washington, D.C. area.  Over time Intel Federal will expand its focus to a wide variety of other programs within the government.

In time, the subsidiary will be open to working with all branches of the government.

Tags: Intel, Exascale, Xeon