BSC participates in a European Public Procurement of Innovation Solutions for the purchase of future supercomputing technologies

05 July 2017

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), together with four other leading European HPC centres, is participating for the first time in a market consultation for the purchase of HPC systems, as published today in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU). The Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions (PPI) involves four public procurers (BSC, CINECA, FZJ/JSC and GENCI) located in four different countries (Spain, Italy, Germany and France) working together in a joint procurement.This collaboration takes place within the Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions for High-Performance Computing (PPI4HPC) project, funded by the European Commission.

On 6 September 2017, an Open Dialogue Event (ODE) will take place in Brussels whose aim is to inform all interested suppliers about their expectations and plans, as well as to gather feedback from the market. The PPI is an administrative action to foster innovation, geared towards enhancing the development of new innovative markets from the demand side through the instrument of public procurement.

BSC Operations Director and PPI4HPC project lead at BSC, Sergi Girona, points out that “for the first time in Europe, a joint European procurement of innovative HPC systems will organise a meeting with IT companies and purchase the HPC technologies of the future. BSC, as one of the main supercomputing centres in Europe, will be part of this innovative project”.

BSC solution focused on compute and storage infrastructure

BSC will acquire a compute and storage infrastructure for high performance data analytics (HPDA), to be installed during the first half of 2019. The BSC HPDA infrastructure will combine compute nodes with innovative storage technologies such as NVRAM in conjunction with storage technologies already in place at BSC, such as standard hard drives and tape infrastructure, configured in a tiered storage solution to store hundreds of petabytes of scientific data. This solution will allow data to be supplied for BSC’s HPC and HPDA resources in the near future, during the pre-exascale period.

As for the compute element, a high performance for data analytics infrastructure will be acquired to complement HPC production clusters currently at BSC, which will pre-process simulation data with new big data or analytics paradigms and algorithms.

The BSC solution is thus expected to provide innovative technologies for massive data storage and tiering. For further information about the PPI, please visit the PPI4HPC project’s website.

About PPI4HPC

A group of leading European supercomputing centres decided to form a buyers’ group to execute a joint Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions (PPI) for the first time in the area of high-performance computing (HPC). The co-funding by the European Commission (EC) will allow for a significant enhancement of the planned pre-exascale HPC infrastructure from 2019 and pave the way for future joint investments in Europe. The total investment planned will be about € 73 million. The HPC centres involved, - BSC, CEA/GENCI, CINECA and JUELICH- have a strong track record in providing supercomputing resources at European level.