FBI boosts servers for faster fingerprint, identity searches

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division today awarded Lockheed Martin a $16 million contract to upgrade its Hewlett Packard Superdome Unix servers.CJIS is the FBI's central repository for criminal justice information services; the CJIS division operates national-level crime data systems that furnish name checks, fingerprints, criminal history data and other information to law enforcement officials. Keeping its systems on the leading edge should help CJIS with its goal of delivering getting timely and relevant criminal justice information to the FBI and all others in the law enforcement community.

The new and upgraded servers will be part of the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.  IAFIS maintains the largest biometric database in the world, containing the fingerprints and corresponding criminal history information for more than 47 million subjects in the Criminal Master File, according to the FBI Web site.  The fingerprints and corresponding criminal history information are submitted voluntarily by state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies.With the contract announced today,  Lockheed Martin's Enterprise Solutions and Services business unit will build on its existing  contract with the CJIS program, by providing HP Uplift Kits for 15 Superdome servers and 1 Flatsdome server.   Uplift kits will add additional processors and additional processor speed to the Superdomes that were originally installed in 2003 by Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin will also add a PA-8900 Superdome server to the Clarksburg, W. Va. facility as part of a project to modernize computer and communications technology at CJIS. CJIS is located on 986 acres of land in Clarksburg, W. Va..  The complex includes a 500,000-square foot main office building. Constructed in a modular design, this building is nearly the length of three football fields. It features a 600-seat cafeteria and a 100,000-square-foot computer center.

It is also home to National Crime Information Center,  an electronic clearinghouse of criminal justice information that can be tapped into by a police officer in a squad car and by any of the 90,000 agencies now connected to the massive computerized database. The system handles an average of 5.5 million queries daily, with responses in fractions of a second, the FBI says.

Lockheed Martin is also the prime systems integrator for the FBI’s overarching $423 million advanced information management and sharing system Sentinel project.  At the heart of the system is moving off two aging IBM mainframes and onto servers support Web applications. The four-phase project with contractor Lockheed Martin is scheduled to wrap up in 2011 at a total cost of about $305 million.

Not expected to be complete until 2010 the FBI says Sentinel will deliver an electronic information management system, automate workflow processes for the first time, and provide a user-friendly web-based interface to access and search across multiple databases. Sentinel will help the FBI manage information beyond the case-focus of the existing Automated Case Support (ACS), and will provide enhanced information sharing, search, and analysis capabilities. Sentinel will also facilitate information sharing with members of the law enforcement and intelligence communities.