IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Tender description

To facilitate the Diamond science programme, Diamond provides extensive control systems, data acquisition systems, data analysis and other data handling processes. These are realised through developments undertaken by an in-house team of ~120 software and computing engineers. They largely use open source software working, in collaboration with comparable projects world-wide, academic groups in universities and commercial organisations. Scientific computing systems support the in-house software team and the facility’s users. They consist of high performance storage, provisioned as GPFS, commodity storage based on NetApp Appliances, a compute cluster with 7k x86 cores and 200 GPUs, a high performance network, Linux workstations and network services. DLS wants to establish a framework agreement with multiple organisations for the supply of suitably qualified and experienced people to undertake and support the development of software and support of computer systems. This will be as part of the development of the distributed control systems or data acquisition systems or data handling systems or other computing projects. In general, this work will involve development of software within the established software frameworks or support of existing software or computer systems. Details of skill sets required for these development activities are outlined in Appendix B of our technical specification.