Acquisition, Delivery, Installation and Hardware and Software Maintenance of Precursors to Exascale Supercomputers

Item Description:

This invitation to tender has been issued by the European Commission on behalf of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, the latter will sign the contract.

The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (hereinafter “EuroHPC JU”) was established by Council Regulation (EU) 2018/1488 of 28 September 2018 (hereinafter “Regulation”) and entered into force on 28 October 2018.

According to Article 3 of the Regulation, the mission of the EuroHPC JU is to develop, deploy, extend and maintain in the Union an integrated world-class supercomputing and data infrastructure and to develop and support a highly competitive and innovative HPC ecosystem.

The EuroHPC JU has the target of equipping the Union by 2020 with an infrastructure of petascale and precursors to exascale supercomputers, and developing the necessary technologies and applications for reaching full exascale capabilities around 2022 / 2023. To this purpose, the EuroHPC JU shall proceed to the acquisition of three world-class precursors to exascale supercomputers, funded by the Union’s budget stemming from Horizon 2020 and the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) and by contributions from the relevant Participating States to the EuroHPC JU. In accordance with Article 10 of the Regulation, the Union’s contribution from Horizon 2020 and CEF funds should cover up to 50 % of the acquisition costs plus up to 50 % of the operating costs of these supercomputers. The EuroHPC JU will be the owner of the supercomputers it has acquired.

The EuroHPC JU has also as target to support a research and innovation programme for developing European technologies and their subsequent integration in exascale supercomputing systems and contribute to developing a competitive European technology supply industry. The EuroHPC JU will implement a procurement framework and operate world-class HPC systems via promotion of technology not existing yet in the market, particularly if it is a competitive European one and thus help research teams and European industries remain at the leading edge in a highly competitive international context.

More information can be found on the EuroHPC JU’s website: https://EuroHPC-ju.europa.eu.

Description of the Procurement

The purpose of the invitation to tender is to select for each lot up to one [1] economic operator (hereafter “Contractor”) for the component acquisition, delivery, assembly, hardware and software installation and maintenance of high-performance computing machines (“Supercomputer”) that will be owned by the EuroHPC JU as well as for the provision of knowledge transfer and training.

The EuroHPC JU will conclude one contract with the successful tenderer for each lot in order to acquire, deliver, install and maintain the Supercomputer in the respective lot hosted by the respective Hosting Entity. Therefore, the prospective Contractors should have proven experience of acquiring, delivering, installing and maintaining Supercomputers in similar environments as the ones required in the lots.

The EuroHPC JU wishes to procure three (3) world-class precursor to exascale supercomputing infrastructures, one per lot, for Europe’s scientific, industrial and public users, matching their demanding application requirements by 2020.

The procurement aims at:

• Providing access to High Performance Computing-based infrastructures and services to a wide range of users from the research and scientific community, as well as the industry including SMEs, and the public sector, for new and emerging data and compute-intensive applications and services
• Fostering science and engineering applications in Europe HPC infrastructure by providing more supercomputing resources;
• Fostering the use of supercomputers primarily for research and innovation purposes falling under public funding programmes that shall be open to users from the public and private sectors and shall have an exclusive focus on civil applications.

The solutions to be procured are expected to outperform existing solutions regarding several of the following aspects:

• Performance/TCO;
• Programmability and usability;
• Versatility;
• System stability;
• Power and energy efficiency;
• Computing density.

The procurement is divided into 3 lots:

• Lot 1: “Acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance of Supercomputer LUMI for Hosting Entity CSC Datacenter”
• Lot 2: “Acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance of Supercomputer MareNostrum 5 for Hosting Entity Barcelona Supercomputer Center”
• Lot 3: “Acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance of Supercomputer Leonardo for Hosting Entity CINECA”

Tenderers may submit tenders for all lots either as an individual tenderer or as leader of a group of economic operators or member of a group of economic operators submitting a tender. A complete separate application with a fixed price must be submitted for each lot. The tenderer may indicate any price reduction it is prepared to grant in the event of being awarded a contract for more than one lot. However, conditional offers will not be accepted. There is no restriction on the number of lots that can be awarded to the same tenderer. In addition, involved entities must not be subject to conflicting interests, which may negatively affect the contract performance.

Tenderers for one or more lots should guarantee the security of the supply chain for any component or subsystem for the expected lifetime of the corresponding supercomputer. The security of the supply chain should also take into account the international context and availability of any sensitive technology components that may be part of the tender Request to Participate. In particular, any tender should provide a risk management approach and appropriate mitigation plans for any such sensitive technology components and subsystems.

The Contracting Authority will give due consideration to the EU added value of the supercomputing system that will be proposed by the tenderer, assessing to what extent it contributes to achieving the objectives of the EuroHPC JU, as these are defined in the Regulation establishing this Joint Undertaking. In this regard, the inclusion of EU technologies and components in the supercomputing system of the tenderer is encouraged, as defined in the Regulation establishing the EuroHPC JU, and in particular Article 3 thereof.

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