SU233(22) Provision of software solution for Supercomputing Wales (Swansea)

Tender description

The Supercomputing Wales (SCW) consortium comprises the four leading research institutions in Wales – Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff and Swansea Universities. Funded by European Structural funds and the Welsh European Funding Office (WEFO), the present SCW contract ends in December 2022.The Swansea component of SCW is located at the Bay Datacentre on the Bay campus. It comprises of some 5,000 skylake cores along with a few nodes with Nvidia V100 and A100 GPUs. Bull Sequana hardware with AMD CPUs.These services were initially installed and commissioned during Q2/2018 by Atos. The solution is based on propriety SCS v5, SLURM job scheduler and connected through a Mellanox InfiniBand (EDR) connected Lustre parallel file system. These are complex systems and the original software support contract for them expired in March 2021 and as such the system has been running at risk since then.This Invitation to Tender relates to software services for the Swansea system only with software services for the Cardiff system to be purchased via a separate exercise, for operational reasons.