I2O Mission oriented Resilient Clouds (MRC) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

DARPA's Information Innovation Office (I2O) grant opportunity titled "Mission oriented Resilient Clouds (MRC)" (Funding Opportunity Number: DARPA BAA 11-55) focuses on high-risk, high-payoff research aimed at fundamentally improving the security and resilience of large-scale networked computing environments. The program is centered on cloud computing infrastructures and other large-scale distributed systems, with an emphasis on approaches that can withstand attacks, failures, and unexpected disruptions while continuing to support critical operational goals. The core idea is to move beyond generic reliability or security upgrades and instead develop systems that can adapt in real time based on an understanding of mission needs, priorities, and acceptable tradeoffs under stress.

A key theme in the solicitation is "mission-aware" resilience. That means DARPA is not simply looking for stronger perimeter defenses or incremental hardening of existing platforms. Instead, the program seeks new ways for cloud and distributed systems to sense when they are under attack or experiencing cascading failures, interpret what those conditions mean for the mission being supported, and then reconfigure themselves accordingly. In practical terms, this could involve adaptive resource allocation, dynamic isolation or compartmentalization, automated recovery workflows, or other mechanisms that keep the most important mission functions running even when parts of the infrastructure are degraded or compromised. The solicitation frames this as a need for "revolutionary advances" in adaptive and resilient computing, implying that proposals should introduce genuinely novel concepts, architectures, or technical methods rather than modest enhancements to what is already widely practiced in industry or government.

The opportunity is categorized as discretionary research and development funding under the Science and Technology and other R&D activity category, with a CFDA listing of 12.910 (Research and Technology Development). DARPA indicates multiple possible award instruments, including cooperative agreements, other procurement contracts, and grants, which reflects the agency's flexibility in structuring awards depending on the nature of the work and the level of government involvement anticipated. There is no cost sharing or matching requirement stated, lowering barriers for participation by universities, companies, and other research organizations.

Eligibility is described as "unrestricted," meaning the competition is generally open to any type of entity, subject to any further clarifications in the full announcement materials. This typically allows participation from academic institutions, commercial firms (including small businesses), nonprofit research organizations, and other qualified performers, often including teams or consortia. Because the program targets complex, large-scale systems problems, it is common for proposals of this kind to bring together expertise across areas such as distributed systems, cybersecurity, formal methods, automated reasoning, systems engineering, networking, and operational mission analysis.

In terms of timing and administrative details, the announcement was posted on June 8, 2011, with related creation metadata dated June 15, 2011. The current closing date listed is July 25, 2011, with submissions due by 12:00 noon on that date, and the opportunity was archived on August 24, 2011. The source data also references an "original closing date" of July 25, 2012, which suggests the announcement may have had revisions or an earlier snapshot that differed from the final public schedule; in practice, applicants would rely on the "current closing date" and the full BAA instructions for the authoritative deadline and submission requirements.

DARPA directs applicants to additional information posted via FedBizOpps (the federal contracting portal used at the time) and provides a point of contact for access issues: Dr. Howard Shrobe, Program Manager at DARPA/I2O, via the BAA coordinator channel. Overall, the solicitation is best read as a call for breakthrough research that rethinks how cloud and distributed infrastructures can remain dependable under real adversarial pressure, using mission-driven adaptation as the organizing principle and explicitly avoiding proposals that merely provide incremental, evolutionary improvements to existing commercial or government practices.

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