High performance computing (HPC) 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 areas of activities of DMI comprise forecasting and warning services for emergency preparedness as well as continuous monitoring of weather, sea state, climate and related environmental conditions in the atmosphere and in the sea.
DMI intends to procure a new High Performance Computing (HPC) facility. The scope of the supply is to replace DMI's current system in order to enhance the capability of DMI to produce high quality numerical weather predictions (NWP) within specified time intervals with a high level of reliability. The intention is 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.
The present HPC facility consists of a 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 100 TB of usable storage.
The procurement of a new HPC facility includes:
a) An HPC facility with an upgrade to enhanced processor technologies (expected 2017) to be included;
b) Maintenance and support service;
c) Consultancy service consisting of application and system support for the HPC facility (preferably experience with HPC facilities at National Meteorological Services);
d) Delivery and installation of Hardware and Software at the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) in Iceland. DMI and IMO have a partnership agreement, under which closer collaboration is planned. As part of this partnership DMI will place the procured HPC facility at IMO premises at Bústaðavegur 7-9, 150 Reykjavík, IS Iceland, under daily physical supervision of IMO. Dates for vendors to inspect IMO premises at Bústaðavegur 7-9, 150 Reykjavík, IS Iceland, are Monday 2015-03-23 with a general site tour for all selected bidders followed by individual follow up meetings with same bidders during Tuesday 2015-03-24.
The Contract includes a delivery and implementation period of approximately 5-7 months where the new HPC facility will be delivered and installed at IMO in Iceland. The expected ‘Site Acceptance Test’ (SAT) and Acceptance of the HPC facility is end 2015 / start 2016.
The procurement, including options, shall be kept within a financial limit as stated in II.2.1.

Deadline
Fristen for modtagelse af bud var på 2015-03-10. Indkøbet blev offentliggjort på 2015-02-05.

Leverandører
Følgende leverandører er nævnt i tildelingsbeslutninger eller andre indkøbsdokumenter:

• • Cray Inc.

Hvem?

• • Danish Meteorological Institute

Hvad?

• • Mainframe › Supercomputer

Hvor?

• • Ísland › Ísland