Short description
The Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) is carrying out this procurement to replace its existing systems used in operational numerical weather prediction, ocean circulation modeling, wind wave prediction and atmospheric composition modeling. The procurement is carried out as an open procedure as defined in the national legislation.
The procurement will be for a turnkey HPC solution that includes all components and services that are required to build, deliver, install and operate HPC systems providing 24/7/365 services. The HPC consists of two separate systems installed in two separate computer rooms with no shared components, including but not limited to computing, interconnect, system and user software components, high performance storage, power supply, cooling and services.
The maximum value of the contract is 4,2 M EUR (VAT 0 %). Value of the additional purchases is 1,2 M EUR (VAT 0 %). FMI will make an official and signed confirmation of this additional order to the Supplier.
The implementation of the procurement depends on funding.
This procurement requires a final decision on the Finnish parliamentary budget in December 2021. The procurement will be made by conditional subject to that positive Finnish parliamentary decision.
The estimated operational service period for the HPC systems is 6 years with possible extension of one year.
The HPC solution has a critical role for FMI operations. Therefore, the emphasis is put on the experience of the vendor in delivering similar turnkey solutions and the maturity of the solution making it suitable for reliable operations. This is in contrast with many research oriented HPC procurements where emphasis is put on the novelty of the solution and peak performance.
The mandatory reference requirements for a potential tenderer are as follows:
— at least one system in current TOP500 list, and
— minimum of three turnkey deliveries for operational weather forecasting of similar size and complexity during the last four years.
One of these turnkey deliveries must be in one of the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, USA, Japan, Australia, the Republic of Korea.
A system delivered earlier than four years ago but still in operational use is not considered a valid reference. An ongoing project can be considered a valid reference, only if the customer has already been granted access to the system and has been able to verify the functionality.
Anonymous references are not accepted. Instead, contact information for each reference must be provided. FMI may control the references during the evaluation phase of the tenders.
The current HPC solution consists of two Cray systems in a fully redundant configuration with no shared components in two separate computer rooms. The main workload and the computationally most demanding workload is Harmonie-Arome NWP model which is run in collaboration with MetCoOp partners Sweden and Norway, every hour for nowcasting and every hour also for ensemble prediction 24/7/365. Other important 24/7 workloads include SILAM atmospheric composition model, NEMO ocean circulation model and WAM wind wave model. It should be noted that only Harmonie-Arome is representing the operational workload in the benchmarks.