Supplies - 219297-2020
12/05/2020    S92

France-Paris: Super computer

2020/S 092-219297

Contract award notice

Results of the procurement procedure

Supplies

Legal Basis:
Directive 2014/24/EU

Section I: Contracting authority

I.1)Name and addresses
Official name: Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif (GENCI)
Postal address: 6 bis, rue Auguste Vitu
Town: Paris
NUTS code: FR101 Paris
Postal code: 75015
Country: France
Contact person: Edouard Brunel
E-mail: achat@genci.fr
Internet address(es):
Main address: www.genci.fr
I.1)Name and addresses
Official name: Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
Postal address: 6 bis, rue Auguste Vitu
Town: Paris
NUTS code: FR101 Paris
Postal code: 75015
Country: France
E-mail: achat@genci.fr
Internet address(es):
Main address: https://www.bsc.es/
I.1)Name and addresses
Official name: Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich Supercomputing Centre
Postal address: 6 bis, rue Auguste Vitu
Town: Paris
NUTS code: FR101 Paris
Postal code: 75015
Country: France
E-mail: achat@genci.fr
Internet address(es):
Main address: http://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/EN/Home/home_node.html
I.1)Name and addresses
Official name: Cineca
Postal address: 6 bis, rue Auguste Vitu
Town: Paris
NUTS code: FR101 Paris
Postal code: 75015
Country: France
E-mail: achat@genci.fr
Internet address(es):
Main address: https://www.cineca.it/
I.2)Information about joint procurement
The contract involves joint procurement
In the case of joint procurement involving different countries, state applicable national procurement law:

French Procurement Law.

I.4)Type of the contracting authority
Body governed by public law
I.5)Main activity
Other activity: Research

Section II: Object

II.1)Scope of the procurement
II.1.1)Title:

Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions (PPI) to Buy Innovative High-performance IT Equipment for European Supercomputing Centres

Reference number: PPI4HPC
II.1.2)Main CPV code
30211100 Super computer
II.1.3)Type of contract
Supplies
II.1.4)Short description:

This contract award notice informs interested operators about the outcome of a tender. On 12 May 2018, a contract notice was published as part of the EU project PPI4HPC for this public procurement of innovative solutions (PPI). The PPI procurement purchases innovative solutions that address the following challenge: providing high-performance IT equipment for European supercomputing centres. The procurement involves four public procurers (BSC, JUELICH, CINECA and GENCI) located in four different countries (Spain, Germany, Italy and France) working together in a joint procurement. The purpose of the procurement is for each public procurer to purchase an innovative high-performance supercomputer and/or an innovative high-performance storage system that will be integrated in their computing centre. These systems are expected to be deployed in the time frame 2019-2021.

II.1.6)Information about lots
This contract is divided into lots: yes
II.1.7)Total value of the procurement (excluding VAT)
Value excluding VAT: 82 633 129.00 EUR
II.2)Description
II.2.1)Title:

Storage and Computing Infrastructure for High-performance Data Analytics

Lot No: 1
II.2.2)Additional CPV code(s)
30211300 Computer platforms
II.2.3)Place of performance
NUTS code: ES ESPAÑA
Main site or place of performance:

Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Carrer de Jordi Girona, 29-31, 08034 Barcelona, SPAIN.

II.2.4)Description of the procurement:

In this lot, BSC will acquire storage and computing infrastructure for high-performance data analytics to be installed during the second half of 2019. The BSC HPDA infrastructure will combine compute nodes with innovative storage technologies like NVRAM in conjunction with storage technologies already in place at BSC, such as normal hard drives and tape infrastructure, configured in a tiered storage solution to store hundreds of petabytes of scientific data.

For the storage part, an innovative tiered storage solution scalable to hundreds of petabytes is expected. It will feed and provide data to the different BSC HPC and HPDA resources now and in the years to come during the pre-exascale period.

For the compute part, a high-performance data analytics infrastructure will be acquired to complement installed BSC HPC production clusters. They will pre- or post-process simulation data with new big data or analytics paradigms and algorithms.

Innovative solutions for massive data storage and tiering are expected for this lot.

Additional information under this section and the contract notice in its entirety are available on the PPI4HPC website at the following address: https://ppi4hpc.eu

For lot 1, one economic operator was selected, as it was the only that presented to this lot. The dialogue phase started with a first context meeting on 23 November 2018 and end of January 2019 as deadline to provide the first offer.

The first session of dialogue took place on 1 March 2019, providing feedback on the first offer received. During this meeting a new deadline was set to the company to provide next offer: April 1.

The second session of dialogue took place on 7 May 2019, and the final technical specifications were delivered to the company for providing their final offer(s) with a deadline to deliver its final offer before 7 June 2019.

Mid July 2019 the evaluation of the final offer was finished, allowing to start with the awarding process. Awarding process start of September. Contract was finally signed on 18 September 2019.

Contract implementation will consist of a deployment phase (which is expected to be completed 3 months after contract award) and an operational validation phase of 6 months — during which the solutions will be evaluated in real-life operational conditions).

Evaluation will be done by BSC during deploy phase.

II.2.5)Award criteria
Quality criterion - Name: Technical value of the system design / Weighting: 30 %
Quality criterion - Name: Quality of services / Weighting: 4 %
Quality criterion - Name: Collaboration / Weighting: 4 %
Cost criterion - Name: Economic offer / Weighting: 15 %
Cost criterion - Name: Cost performance analysis based on the performance evaluation and the TCO evaluation / Weighting: 47 %
II.2.11)Information about options
Options: no
II.2.13)Information about European Union funds
The procurement is related to a project and/or programme financed by European Union funds: yes
Identification of the project:

Grant agreement No 754271 — PPI4HPC This procurement receives funding under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under the grant agreement No 754271 — PPI4HPC (volume of EUR 73 000 000, excluding VAT — for more information, see https://ppi4hpc.eu). The EU has given a grant for this procurement but is not participating as a contracting authority in the procurement.

II.2.14)Additional information

The abstracts of the winning tenders are available on https://ppi4hpc.eu/news/bsc-acquires-innovative-technology-optimised-storage-and-data-analysis

Deployment of the innovative solutions is expected to take place between October 2019 and January 2020. Evaluation of operating the deployed solutions in real-life operational conditions is expected to take place between February 2020 and May 2020.

II.2)Description
II.2.1)Title:

Acquisition, Delivery, Installation and Maintenance of a Supercomputer with Innovative Support for Data-intensive Applications

Lot No: 2
II.2.2)Additional CPV code(s)
30200000 Computer equipment and supplies
II.2.3)Place of performance
NUTS code: DE DEUTSCHLAND
Main site or place of performance:

Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Wilhelm-Johnen-Straße, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, 52428 Jülich, GERMANY.

II.2.4)Description of the procurement:

The goal of the lot is to procure a high-performance computing resource that is planned to be installed at Jülich Supercomputing Centre’s (JSC) supercomputing facility by the end of 2020. The system will replace the currently operated JURECA cluster and must be able to execute the diverse workloads of this system with significantly higher performance and energy efficiency. In addition, the system shall have architectural features specifically targeted at data-intensive science. In particular, JSC expects the system to integrate dense memory technologies into its memory hierarchy and to expose this memory to applications through novel APIs. The system is expected to be connected to the central storage subsystem in the JSC facility with high bandwidth. In addition to the dense memory integration, JSC expects innovative hardware and software solutions offering high energy efficiency as well as improved facility integration (e.g. improved power monitoring and control) and application performance monitoring capabilities.

Additional information under this section and the contract notice in its entirety are available on the PPI4HPC website at the following address: https://ppi4hpc.eu

II.2.5)Award criteria
Quality criterion - Name: Technical value of the system design / Weighting: 40 %
Quality criterion - Name: Quality of services / Weighting: 15 %
Quality criterion - Name: Collaboration / Weighting: 5 %
Cost criterion - Name: Cost performance analysis based on the performance evaluation and the TCO evaluation / Weighting: 40 %
II.2.11)Information about options
Options: yes
Description of options:

The contract will enter into force from its notification to the awarded economic operator and will last five (5) years, with the option to extend the duration by another year. The option to extend the five (5) year contract by another year needs to be taken into account in the financial offer (Proposal Statement). No changes to the original contract will be made for the optional year. JUELICH will inform the contractor at least one (1) month before the termination of the five (5) year contract whether the option will be chosen.

II.2.13)Information about European Union funds
The procurement is related to a project and/or programme financed by European Union funds: yes
Identification of the project:

Grant agreement No 754271 — PPI4HPC This procurement receives funding under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under the grant agreement No 754271 — PPI4HPC (volume of EUR 73 000 000, excluding VAT — for more information, see https://ppi4hpc.eu). The EU has given a grant for this procurement but is not participating as a contracting authority in the procurement.

II.2.14)Additional information

Deployment of the innovative solutions is expected to take place between September 2019 and March 2021. Evaluation of operating the deployed solutions in real-life operational conditions is expected to take place between February 2021 and August 2021.

II.2)Description
II.2.1)Title:

Evolution of the Tier-0 System Towards Exascale Architectures

Lot No: 3
II.2.2)Additional CPV code(s)
30211100 Super computer
II.2.3)Place of performance
NUTS code: IT ITALIA
Main site or place of performance:

CINECA, Via Magnanelli, 6/3, 40033 Casalecchio di Reno BO, ITALIA.

II.2.4)Description of the procurement:

The goal of the lot is to procure a new supercomputing system that will replace the scale-out partition of MARCONI. With the deploy of the new system CINECA aims to reach a total computing power of the order of 50 PFlops featuring node architecture that maximise the performance throughput per energy unit. The procured resource integrated in the MARCONI infrastructure represents a new step towards the architectural convergence between high performance computing, high performance data analytics and A.I. and will be able to run computing and data intensive workloads by exploiting the most recent GPU accelerators, high IOPS disks and state-of the-art low latency interconnection.

The procurement process lasted ten months and saw five economic operators qualify for this lot, but only four participated to the context meeting in March 2019 due to the withdrawal of one participant. Two subsequent meetings were set, on the 29 April 2019 and 19 June 2019, in order to review the technical roadmaps of the qualified candidates. To evaluate the TCO impact of the proposed solutions, CINECA released to all economic operators the benchmark instruction document and all the benchmark suite, on the 17 June 2019 through public online repository. The final offers, containing the committed results of the benchmarks and based on the final RFP requirements were submitted by three economic operators due to the withdrawal of one qualified candidate. The evaluation panel has opted to require further details to verify the congruity of the offered solutions with respect to the power constraints and the benchmark results, before submitting the final evaluation ranking.

Contract implementation will consist of a deployment phase (which is expected to be completed 4 months after contract award) and an operational validation phase of 1 month — during which the solutions will be evaluated in real-life operational conditions). The evaluation phase will be conducted by CINECA staff specialists and selected external users, together with contractor’s engineers, with the aim to properly tune the system for production.

II.2.5)Award criteria
Quality criterion - Name: Technical value of the system design / Weighting: 35 %
Quality criterion - Name: Quality of services / Weighting: 10 %
Quality criterion - Name: Collaboration / Weighting: 5 %
Cost criterion - Name: Cost performance analysis based on the performance evaluation and the TCO evaluation / Weighting: 50 %
II.2.11)Information about options
Options: no
II.2.13)Information about European Union funds
The procurement is related to a project and/or programme financed by European Union funds: yes
Identification of the project:

Grant agreement No 754271 — PPI4HPC This procurement receives funding under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under the grant agreement No 754271 — PPI4HPC (volume of EUR 73 000 000, excluding VAT — for more information, see https://ppi4hpc.eu). The EU has given a grant for this procurement but is not participating as a contracting authority in the procurement.

II.2.14)Additional information

The abstracts of the winning tenders are available on https://ppi4hpc.eu/news/marconi100-new-accelerated-gpu-cluster

Deployment of the innovative solutions is expected to take place between December 2019 and April 2020. Evaluation of operating the deployed solutions in real-life operational conditions is expected to take place between May 2020 and June 2020.

II.2)Description
II.2.1)Title:

Framework Agreement for the Acquisition, Delivery, Installation, Maintenance and Decommissioning of a High-performance and Energy-efficient Computing System Towards the Convergence of HPC, HPDA and AI

Lot No: 4
II.2.2)Additional CPV code(s)
30211100 Super computer
II.2.3)Place of performance
NUTS code: FR104 Essonne
Main site or place of performance:

CEA DAM Ile-De-France, TGCC (Très Grand Centre de calcul du CEA), Chemin Grand Rué, 91680 Bruyères Le Châtel, FRANCE.

II.2.4)Description of the procurement:

The goal of the lot is to increase, during the second half of 2019, the computing power installed in the TGCC (Très Grand Centre de Calcul du CEA, located near Paris) and make it available to French and European researchers. Targeting several tens of Petaflop/s, the new HPC resource will be seamlessly integrated into the system installed in early 2018 in the same location. The new system will provide a balanced architecture for scientific applications, including very high IO bandwidth connection to the storage system of the TGCC. In order to fulfil such requirements and to achieve a high-energy efficiency together with an excellent performance/TCO ratio towards exascale systems, GENCI expects innovative solutions both in terms of hardware (processors, interconnection network...) and in terms of software (novel programming models....) as well as strong support from the provider, particularly during early operation of the new system including a contribution to application porting and optimisation.

Additional information under this section and the contract notice in its entirety are available on the PPI4HPC website at the following address: https://ppi4hpc.eu

The duration of this framework agreement is due to the availability of the equipment and facilities, the technical complexity of the solution to be implemented and the depreciation period of the equipment.

Contract implementation will include the installation of the new system followed by an acceptance phase consisting of a provisional acceptance phase and a pre-production qualification phase with the goal of checking that the system is performing as expected during an early operation stage. The pre-production qualification phase will last 3 months. An operational validation phase lasting 9 months will follow during which the solutions will be evaluated in real-life operational conditions.

The selected operators will retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (IPRs) that they generate in the PPI and will be able to use them to exploit the full market potential of their innovative solutions i.e. beyond this procurement. For reference, the worldwide market size of the HPC server markets was evaluated by Hyperion Research to USD 6.7 billion for the first half of 2019.

II.2.5)Award criteria
Quality criterion - Name: Technical value of the system design / Weighting: 20 %
Quality criterion - Name: Quality of services / Weighting: 15 %
Quality criterion - Name: Collaboration / Weighting: 5 %
Cost criterion - Name: Cost performance analysis based on the performance evaluation and the TCO evaluation / Weighting: 60 %
II.2.11)Information about options
Options: no
II.2.13)Information about European Union funds
The procurement is related to a project and/or programme financed by European Union funds: yes
Identification of the project:

Grant agreement No 754271 — PPI4HPC This procurement receives funding under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under the grant agreement No 754271 — PPI4HPC (volume of EUR 73 000 000, excluding VAT — for more information, see https://ppi4hpc.eu). The EU has given a grant for this procurement but is not participating as a contracting authority in the procurement.

II.2.14)Additional information

The abstracts of the winning tenders are available on https://www.ppi4hpc.eu/news

Deployment of the innovative solutions is expected to take place between October 2019 and December 2019 Evaluation of operating the deployed solutions in real-life operational conditions is expected to take place between January 2020 and December 2020.

Section IV: Procedure

IV.1)Description
IV.1.1)Type of procedure
Competitive dialogue
IV.1.3)Information about a framework agreement or a dynamic purchasing system
IV.1.8)Information about the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA)
The procurement is covered by the Government Procurement Agreement: yes
IV.2)Administrative information
IV.2.1)Previous publication concerning this procedure
Notice number in the OJ S: 2018/S 090-202138
IV.2.8)Information about termination of dynamic purchasing system
IV.2.9)Information about termination of call for competition in the form of a prior information notice

Section V: Award of contract

Contract No: CONSU02018026OP Ref: 2018/S 090-202138 PPI4HPC
Lot No: 1
Title:

Storage and Computing Infrastructure for High-performance Data Analytics

A contract/lot is awarded: yes
V.2)Award of contract
V.2.1)Date of conclusion of the contract:
18/09/2019
V.2.2)Information about tenders
Number of tenders received: 1
Number of tenders received from SMEs: 0
Number of tenders received from tenderers from other EU Member States: 0
Number of tenders received from tenderers from non-EU Member States: 0
Number of tenders received by electronic means: 1
The contract has been awarded to a group of economic operators: no
V.2.3)Name and address of the contractor
Official name: International Business Machines SA
Postal address: Santa Hortensia, 26-28, 28002
Town: Madrid
NUTS code: ES300 Madrid
Country: Spain
The contractor is an SME: no
V.2.4)Information on value of the contract/lot (excluding VAT)
Initial estimated total value of the contract/lot: 1 350 000.00 EUR
Total value of the contract/lot: 1 350 000.00 EUR
V.2.5)Information about subcontracting

Section V: Award of contract

Contract No: I10-42187388
Lot No: 2
Title:

Acquisition, Delivery, Installation and Maintenance of a Supercomputer with Innovative Support for Data-intensive Applications

A contract/lot is awarded: yes
V.2)Award of contract
V.2.1)Date of conclusion of the contract:
06/02/2020
V.2.2)Information about tenders
Number of tenders received: 3
Number of tenders received from SMEs: 0
Number of tenders received from tenderers from other EU Member States: 1
Number of tenders received from tenderers from non-EU Member States: 0
Number of tenders received by electronic means: 0
The contract has been awarded to a group of economic operators: no
V.2.3)Name and address of the contractor
Official name: Bull GmbH
Postal address: Von-der-Wettern-Straße 27 51149 Köln
Town: Köln
NUTS code: DEA23 Köln, Kreisfreie Stadt
Country: Germany
The contractor is an SME: no
V.2.4)Information on value of the contract/lot (excluding VAT)
Initial estimated total value of the contract/lot: 24 200 000.00 EUR
Total value of the contract/lot: 24 200 000.00 EUR
V.2.5)Information about subcontracting

Section V: Award of contract

Lot No: 3
Title:

Evolution of the Tier-0 System Towards Exascale Architectures

A contract/lot is awarded: yes
V.2)Award of contract
V.2.1)Date of conclusion of the contract:
23/12/2019
V.2.2)Information about tenders
Number of tenders received: 3
Number of tenders received from SMEs: 0
Number of tenders received from tenderers from other EU Member States: 0
Number of tenders received from tenderers from non-EU Member States: 0
Number of tenders received by electronic means: 0
The contract has been awarded to a group of economic operators: no
V.2.3)Name and address of the contractor
Official name: IBM Italia S.p.A.
Postal address: Circonvallazione idroscalo — 20090
Town: Segrate
NUTS code: ITC4C Milano
Country: Italy
The contractor is an SME: no
V.2.4)Information on value of the contract/lot (excluding VAT)
Initial estimated total value of the contract/lot: 25 000 000.00 EUR
Total value of the contract/lot: 25 000 000.00 EUR
V.2.5)Information about subcontracting

Section V: Award of contract

Lot No: 4
Title:

Framework Agreement for the Acquisition, Delivery, Installation, Maintenance and Decommissioning of a High-performance and Energy-efficient Computing System Towards the Convergence of HPC, HPDA and AI

A contract/lot is awarded: yes
V.2)Award of contract
V.2.1)Date of conclusion of the contract:
29/03/2019
V.2.2)Information about tenders
Number of tenders received: 1
Number of tenders received from SMEs: 0
Number of tenders received from tenderers from other EU Member States: 0
Number of tenders received from tenderers from non-EU Member States: 0
Number of tenders received by electronic means: 0
The contract has been awarded to a group of economic operators: no
V.2.3)Name and address of the contractor
Official name: BULL SAS
Postal address: Rue Jean Jaurès, BP68, 78340
Town: Les Clayes-Sous-Bois
NUTS code: FR FRANCE
Country: France
The contractor is an SME: no
V.2.4)Information on value of the contract/lot (excluding VAT)
Initial estimated total value of the contract/lot: 32 000 000.00 EUR
Total value of the contract/lot: 32 083 129.00 EUR
V.2.5)Information about subcontracting

Section VI: Complementary information

VI.3)Additional information:
VI.4)Procedures for review
VI.4.1)Review body
Official name: Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris
Postal address: Parvis du Tribunal de Paris
Town: Paris
Postal code: 75017
Country: France
Telephone: +33 144325151
VI.4.4)Service from which information about the review procedure may be obtained
Official name: Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris
Postal address: Parvis du Tribunal de Paris
Town: Paris
Postal code: 75017
Country: France
Telephone: +33 144325151
VI.5)Date of dispatch of this notice:
07/05/2020