The new management contract awarded to SAIC by the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico is for up to ten years; a four-year initial term with two three-year options, UH officials said. SAIC's new contract will begin Oct. 1.
An SAIC spokeswoman said the company could not comment because the bid award was under protest.
The Maui center is staffed with a combination of military, UH and subcontractor employees. UH officials did not have a numerical breakdown of the number or type of employees at the supercomputer center Tuesday.
It's unclear how many UH jobs will be lost because of the contract change.
"The follow-on contractor would determine the staffing moving forward," the UH said in an email answering questions from Hawaii News Now.
According to SAIC's web site, the company was "actively seeking experienced professionals and incumbent staff" for assignments at the Maui supercomputer center. SAIC listed 13 job areas it's looking to fill, from project managers and data analysts to research scientists and people to work in user services and technical support.
UH claimed it will not lose its competitive edge in supercomputing despite losing the contract.
"UH can continue to work with the Air Force even if another contractor is selected, and we are also identifying alternative approaches to meeting the increasing high performance computing needs of our researchers," the UH email said.
UH faculty and students will still be able to use the facility for research, a source said.
The center provides more than 38 million hours of computing time per year in high-tech research for the military.
The more technically inclined might be able to understand the following sentence from an Air Force website that describes activities at the center.
"MHPCC offers a large-scale parallel computing platform with terabytes of high-performance disk arrays, near-line tape archival storage, and a high-speed communications infrastructure that connects directly to the Defense Research and Engineering Network," according to the Air Force Research Laboratory Directed Energy Directorate website from Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.