Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) announced today that its Suffolk-based laboratory has been added to the Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN). The DREN is the Department of Defense's research and engineering network that provides connectivity among 120 national laboratories and research organizations of the High Performance Computing Modernization Program. Over the last six years, SAIC has worked with the Joint Futures Lab and Joint Warfighting Center to provide systems engineers and analysts in support of the Joint Experimentation and Joint Training programs as part of U.S. Joint Forces Command's (USJFCOM) transformation missions. Currently, SAIC has more than 180 supporting staff members in Suffolk and more than 3,500 employees total in the Hampton Roads area. "SAIC's lab brings not only local resources to USJFCOM, but resources from across the country as a node on a distributed network of labs," said Dave Robinson, SAIC technical director. "SAIC's Enterprise Services Integration & Interoperability Lab (ESIIL) labs across the country provide a distributed, vendor-neutral environment to develop community of interest solutions to include architectures based upon distributed Web services or service- oriented architectures." SAIC's DREN connection is located in Suffolk in the Joint Systems of Systems Collaborative Environment Laboratory, one of six nodes on the ESIIL network of labs. SAIC's lab facilitates concept and concept-based requirements development and is capable of conducting advanced concept technology demonstrations. It serves as a portal to a distributed collaborative network of live, virtual and constructive simulations applicable to experimentation, testing and training.