The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded a purchase order to Parallel Works Inc. for compute services supporting the Network of Optimal Dynamic Energy Signatures (NODES) program, with a ceiling of $4.5 million and an award date of July 13, 2026.
The originating solicitation, posted April 17, 2026, was set aside for Women-Owned Small Businesses under NAICS 518210 with a $40 million size standard, though this award carries no set-aside designation. The requirement calls for a managed high-performance computing solution delivering 50 NVIDIA HGX H100 80GB GPUs (or equivalent/better, including NVIDIA Blackwell B200/GB200) with 550TB of NFS storage, 100G Internet access, and 24/7/365 Tier 1 support plus Tier 3 scientific software support (CUDA, NCCL, drivers, clusterware, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) for up to 100 users. Security compliance mandates SOC 2 Type II certification and CMMC Level 1 (Self) or higher. Billing is metered per-baseboard-hour consumption. The base period runs May 15 through October 14, 2026; the option period runs October 15, 2026 through March 14, 2027. Place of performance is Chicago, Illinois. Ultimate completion is May 12, 2027.