Computer equipment and supplies

Tender description

The scope of the contract is to design, manufacture, supply, deliver, install and commission of a number of generic x86 computing nodes and an associated low latency high bandwidth interconnect and switch. The scope of the contract is to design, manufacture, supply, deliver, install and commission of a number of generic x86 computing nodes and an associated low latency high bandwidth interconnect and switch. 1) The total budget for this contract is 250 000 GBP exc. VAT. The new hardware procured as part of this contract will need to be delivered, installed and invoiced for by the 9.12.2019. The removal and disposal of existing hardware will be the responsibility of Diamond; 2) The hardware will be used as a testbed for prototyping Cloud Native Computing software such as Kubernetes, and new hardware architectures such as the latest data centre class NVIDIA GPUs. 3 classes of node are desired: Class 1: should contain at least one of the latest generation of data centre class NVIDIA GPUs; Class 2: should contain connectivity for at least 2 NVMe disks that are front loaded into the chassis. The actual NVMe disks are not part of this tender; Class 3: should be a generic CPU compute node with a large number of cores and memory. 3) DRAM should be interoperable between all classes; 4) All classes should contain the same type of NIC that is capable of Open V-Switch offload, and NVMe-oF; 5) All classes should be connected by one low latency network switch. ‘Bare metal’ switches with a network operating system that is decoupled from the switch maker will be considered. Network switches that provide integration with modern configuration management tools such as Ansible, and analytics for container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes will be preferable.