U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) signed this week a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the Hewlett-Packard Company under the provisions of the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986. USJFCOM's technology transfer authority allows it to share investment in research and development by entering into CRADAs with private companies and other entities. The objective is cooperative research that will enhance the mission of the command and benefit the other party. CRADAs define the individual responsibilities of each party toward achieving that objective, as well as rights to intellectual property developed under the CRADA. The command gets the use of the intellectual property, while the research partner's patent rights are protected. The CRADA between USJFCOM and HP is a five-year cooperative agreement focused on high performance computing. USJFCOM is researching computer resource allocation applications to effectively and efficiently use multi-processor computer clusters. These powerful computer resources will support various joint modeling and simulation environments used to accomplish elements of USJFCOM's joint training and joint experimentation missions. HP will provide the command with a 100-processor supercomputing cluster and technical expertise to support the research effort. USJFCOM will provide HP access to the command's constructive simulation computer testing, so it can measure how its hardware supports commercial provisioning software in a robust constructive simulation environment. "HP has a very long history of commitment to advanced research and development, and currently funds a multi-billion-dollar annual R&D program," said Tom Hempfield, vice president, Federal Sales - Americas, HP. "We look forward to working with USJFCOM's state-of-the-art test and evaluation program, which is among the most rigorous in the world." According to Mike Egnor, deputy director of USJFCOM's Office of Research and Technology Applications, the agreement goes beyond that initial testing. "The initial research plan is five months, but the CRADA is for five years," Egnor said. "We hope to work on other collaborative efforts in that time. This is a win-win partnering agreement."