High performance computing facility for forecasting weather, ocean and climate

Danish Meteorological Institute

The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) provides meteorological and related services for the community within the large geographical area of the Kingdom of Denmark, meaning Denmark, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland, including their surrounding waters and airspace. The area of activity of DMI comprises forecasting and warning services for emergency preparedness as well as continuous monitoring of weather, sea state, climate, and related environmental conditions in the atmosphere, over land and in the sea.
DMI intends to procure a new High Performance Computing (HPC) facility. The scope of the supply is to replace the current system in order to enhance the capability of DMI to produce high quality numerical weather predictions (NWP) within specified limited time intervals with a high level of reliability. With the intention to carry out NWP at higher spatial resolution, thereby improving forecast of extreme weather events such as rainstorms, DMI is presently undergoing a transition from the hydrostatic Hirlam model to the non hydrostatic Harmonie model, which will be the main NWP model operated on the new HPC facility. The new system will also be used to provide DMI with increased capability of ocean and climate modelling. DMI aims at a delivery process where the performance profile of the HPC best comply with the DMI requirement profile and projected model evolution. This will be further detailed in the tender documents.
The new HPC facility will replace the present pair of Cray XT-5 systems along with its shared Lustre storage subsystem. The present system, which was installed in 2008 and which had its 4-core processors upgraded to 6-core processors in 2011, has an aggregated peak performance of 60 TF across 512 compute nodes, each with 12 AMD Opteron compute cores and 16 GB memory. In addition to the compute nodes each Cray XT-5 system has eight front-end login nodes meant for interactive development and file manipulation work. The shared Lustre storage subsystem is worth 110 TB of usable storage.
In line with projected model evolution shall the new HPC facility have sufficient processing power to run the DMI NWP model systems with a significant improvement in calculations and disk throughput compared to the present HPC facility in the same timeslot. This will most likely require a system with more high speed compute cores than the present HPC facility alongside with sufficient memory (+ bandwidth) and disk (+ bandwidth) in order to make the new HPC facility balanced and without bottlenecks. The procurement will additionally include system software, inclusive of an appropriate programming environment, along with installation and documentation plus software and hardware support for at least five years. These specifications will be further detailed in the tender documents.
DMI and the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) have entered into a partnership agreement, under which closer collaboration is planned. As part of this partnership, the procured HPC shall be installed in Iceland under daily physical supervision of IMO. A detailed description of the installation premises in Iceland along with a date for a possible site inspection will be part of the tender documents.
The procurement, including options selected at the time of contract signature, shall be kept within a financial limit as stated in II.2.1.

Deadline
Fristen for modtagelse af bud var på 2015-01-15. Indkøbet blev offentliggjort på 2014-12-09.

Hvem?

• • Danish Meteorological Institute

Hvad?

• • Mainframe › Supercomputer

Hvor?

• • Ísland › Ísland