Audio-visual equipment

Tender description

Procurement of new visualisation facilities at Science & Technology Facilities Council's new building, the Hartree Centre. Installation of new collaborative and development rooms and integration of existing equipment at the new premises on the Daresbury Laboratories site. The Hartree Centre of the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is entering into a tender process for the procurement of new visualisation facilities at its new building on the same campus, installation of new collaborative and development rooms and integration of existing equipment at its new premises on the Daresbury Laboratories site. The newly relocated and updated visualisation facilities will complement a large investment in supercomputing capabilities at the Hartree Centre, Daresbury. In addition to large-scale visualisation, these procured facilities must be capable of supporting collaborative working with partners on site locally and offsite via collaborative communications technologies. Connectivity between visualisation and High Performance computing for scalability and computational steering will also be an important element. Interoperability and flexibility is also key, so as to be able to address future use cases. The supplier will be expected to work collaboratively with Hartree (and its academic and commercial partners) to develop visualisation capabilities for future extreme high performance and data intensive computing systems and to enable the wider the use of high performance computing technology by UK industry to enhance the UK's international competitiveness. We are looking for a partner who can supply world-leading facilities, that have the expertise to enable us to make full use of the facilities, and that is prepared to enhance the development of Hartree activities. The main purpose of this procurement is to fit out the newly built visualisation facility in the relocated Hartree Centre in Building 2, to establish a fully operational visual computing centre for demonstration, project delivery and on-going development. This will include a new flat wall based visualisation room, 2 new Visual Collaboration Labs (VCLs), integration of the existing curved screen facility and an Emerging Technology Lab (ETL) which will be used for evaluation, showcasing and development of key new technologies. The plan is also to provide a more centralised infrastructure to enable more flexible utilisation of resources and the ability to adapt to evolving requirements and new use cases as they emerge. Operational Principles The key operational principles for this new facility will be to provide: — Differentiated capability — to include state of the art computer systems and display systems. — Support Workflow and Operations of the Hartree Centre — the facility is intended to work for users in Business Development, Public Outreach, Research Science and Development as well its partners. — Flexibility — an ability to reconfigure display systems and sources to be connected between different rooms as needed. — Collaboration — to support working in teams internally and with external partners and clients. — Ideation — an ability to support idea creation, innovation, problem solving in teams. — Communications — to enable users to communicate easily with remote partners and clients and to be able to easily share visual content over a range of diverse communication platforms. — Demonstration — the facilities should also act as a showcase and promote the work of Hartree and STFC in general. This could be to clients, partners, sponsors, seminar attendees or the general public for outreach. — Development — to provide an environment to track, evaluate and integrate and showcase emerging technologies. — Scalability — provide the ability to scale visual computing problems at 3 levels: o Ability to easily connect individual, portable personal computer visualisation systems into the visualisation infrastructure. o Provision of powerful standalone visualisation systems to drive the display facilities. o Access to extreme high performance problems running on the STFC HPC systems and provide advanced visual computing capabilities through remote visualisation.