Lockheed chooses HP products for AFIS pact

Lockheed Martin Corp. has selected Hewlett-Packard Co. workstations and servers to build the heart of the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS).

Lockheed Martin in January captured the $109 million Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) contract, one of five contracts in the $400 million IAFIS program. AFIS will provide the FBI's core search engine.

Lockheed Martin tapped HP's Exemplar servers to be the "technological cornerstone needed to" build the fingerprint-matching system, said Jerry Zionic, Lockheed Martin's program manager for the fingerprint system.

Lockheed Martin's use of Exemplar servers marks the first time the product will be used in a nonexperimental federal application.

The Defense Department has used Exemplars in the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative and in aerospace engineering.

Exemplar servers feature scalable parallel processing, which was a key reason for Lockheed Martin's successful bid for AFIS.

A System Based on COTS

Lockheed Martin will use 26 Exemplar servers, with another server acting as a backup, to build AFIS. For AFIS, the FBI was looking for a contractor to develop fingerprint-matching software for a system based on commercial off-the-shelf components that would make the addition of new technologies easier. The Exemplar servers met those criteria, Zionic said.

The system also needed to be powerful enough to handle an estimated 50,000 fingerprint-search requests a day from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

IAFIS will identify possible fingerprint matches in 24 hours, compared with the current matching process, which can take months.