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Strong relationships between the public and private sectors in the Mediterranean powerhouse are spurring domestic and international advancements.

Despite the global economic downturn, the Turkish defense market has been experiencing significant growth through modernization projects. A strategy by the government offers increased opportunities for the nation’s own industrial base to develop leading capabilities for the country’s armed forces. Simultaneously, ministry and company officials are expanding outreach to foreign allies to open their markets to Turkish goods.

During the past decade, Turkey has promoted commercial advantages in defense, aerospace and security. The country has two non-governmental organizations focused on expanding commercial opportunities for domestic businesses, one with an emphasis on local markets and another with responsibility for export support. These types of initiatives have helped Turkish industry enjoy a rapid and, officials believe, sustainable growth. One of the most successful companies in the country is ASELSAN, which is striving to improve national defense and security through many facets of its work. “We believe that the technological competitiveness of the Turkish defense industry, with increasing financial figures in revenues, is sustainable only through a full cooperation among the community,” says Cengiz Ergeneman, chief executive officer of ASELSAN.

As a follow-up to conference sponsorship and attendance financial regulations announced earlier this year, Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has implemented a tiered approval structure to assist in oversight of U.S. Defense Department participation in future events.

Big data can mean big problems for the people trying to derive usable information from a large number of sources. Since coming into existence in March, the Scalable Data Management, Analysis and Visualization Institute has made strides to resolve this issue for programs running on supercomputers. The young organization’s efforts have applicability to a variety of scientific fields—including nuclear physics—and its tools are open source so others can take advantage of the findings.

Funding comes from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), under which the institute falls. For the next five years, the department will provide $5 million annually to support research among the members, which include seven universities and six national laboratories. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is the lead, because one of its staff, Arie Shoshani, was chosen as the institute’s director. The private company Kitware Incorporated also is a member, supplying its visualization toolkit for partners to use. Shoshani explains that his organization’s emphasis on scientific data, large scale simulations and in-situ processing separate it from other agencies working on big data projects. Running data reduction, analysis and visualization tasks in situ means that these tasks are performed on the same machine where the simulation takes place. This allows such functions to be performed on the system in memory before getting the data out to disk, and therefore greatly reduces the amount of data that has to be stored on disk for further, or post-processing, analysis.

A new computing architecture emphasizes shared resources.

The nation’s intelligence community has embarked on a path toward a common computer desktop and a cloud computing environment designed to facilitate both timely sharing of information and cost savings. The implementation could result in budget savings of 20 to 25 percent over existing information technology spending within six years, but the ramifications could include large cultural changes that result both in lost jobs and business for industry partners.

Al Tarasiuk, chief intelligence officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), explains that the changes will be difficult. Agency employees, and the vendors who help operate and manage information technology for the 17 agencies composing the nation’s intelligence apparatus, will feel the effects of the cost cuts.

“Right now, technology is not our biggest risk. The culture change is our biggest risk, and that extends to our industry partners. We have a lot of industry employed in the community through service contracts and other things. They could help, or they could choose not to help,” Tarasiuk emphasizes, candidly describing the pivotal role of these firms in a transition that could spell the loss of both business and jobs. “They know, and I’ve been very open with them, that we’re not going to need the pool of resources of people that we have today to manage what we have in the future.”