Provision of Research Technology Partnership

Tender description

The University of Birmingham has established an integrated research environment known as BEAR (Birmingham Environment for Academic Research) as a set of interrelated services to support many aspects of the research workflow. This tender is to extend the existing research partnership, both by enhancing the existing services and potentially adding new services. We emphasise that this is not just, or even primarily, a hardware procurement. <br />The overall requirements are discussed in detail in the Specification of Requirement section and the full ITT. These can be summarised as: <br />• developing and strengthening the existing Research Computing partnership with a partner to expand the number and range of users of the service <br />• expanding the existing HPC cluster <br />• expanding the existing Research Data Archive and Research Data store, including the need to manage sensitive data such as patient data <br />• awareness of the national and international High Performance Computing landscape, including access to national and international HPC resources <br />• awareness of national and international funding opportunities, both for University-level HPC services and discipline-specific calls that may be leveraged to develop local resources <br />Additionally, providing access to technical expertise and experience, which might be through specialist third-parties that the tenderer has a long-standing and close relationship with, in the following areas will be beneficial: <br />• applications services on Windows HPC service <br />• batch render farms <br />• remote and collaborative rendering <br />• application of cloud services to research <br />