BoM tenders for supercomputer

The Bureau of Meteorology has released a request for tender for the supply and support of a supercomputer.

BOM’s current ICT architecture runs on an Oracle/Sun Constellation HPC system and is based upon the build of the Fujitsu system housed at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) facility in Canberra.

The NCI HPC has 57,472 cores of 2.6 Ghz Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge technology in 3592 compute nodes; 160 terabytes (approx.) of main memory; 56 Gbps Infiniband FDR interconnect; and 10 GB/s file system bandwidth and ~10 PBytes of usable fast file system. BoM is seeking to increase this capacity by at least 50 per cent.

The supplier can either provide a single supercomputer with equal to or greater than 600 TFlops, or two identical supercomputers each with equal to or greater than 1.2 PFlops.

The supercomputer must be located in an off-site data centre, and have the option to utilise SSD-based storage subsystem for the parallel file system.

Each system must have a mid-life upgrade for improved compute of at least two times the capacity and performance, which is to take place in 2018.

BOM is looking to sign a six-year contract with the chosen supplier, with a possible extension of one year. Performance of services is to take place from 2015 through to 2021, while meeting 99.5 per cent uptime availability and computational performance service levels.

Sound estimates for the cost of delivering and supporting the supercomputer must be included, including all software and equipment to install and operate the systems.

“The Bureau will need to replace its existing HPC system in 2016 to meet the requirements of the current and future meteorological, oceanographic, hydrological and environmental services through deterministic and probabilistic numerical prediction and analysis systems from weather to climate time-scales. The Bureau’s computational and storage infrastructure is critical to the delivery of these services,” BOM said in its RFT documents.