First call to acquire world-class supercomputers in Europe

The procurement will include the acquisition, delivery, installation and hardware and software maintenance of three pre-exascale supercomputers, capable of executing more than 150 Petaflops or more than 150 million billion calculations per second. 

The objective of this call (reference SMART 2019/1084) is to foster better science and enhance innovation  in Europe by providing access to leading edge High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures and services to a wide range of users from the research and scientific community as well as the industry (including SMEs) and the public sector. These new European supercomputers will support the development of leading scientific, public sector and industrial applications in many domains, including personalised medicine, bio-engineering, weather forecasting /climate change, discovering new materials and drugs.

The estimated total value for the call is EUR 415 910 000. The procurement is divided into three lots:

• Lot 1 relates to the "Lumi" EuroHPC supercomputer, which will be hosted by CSC, the Finnish IT Center for Science, and to be installed in its data center in Kajaani (Finland). This lot foresees the procurement and maintenance of a leadership-class pre-exascale accelerated supercomputer, which enables the convergence of HPC, artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance data analytics (HPDA). The LUMI system is committed to provide the best possible user experience, featuring emerging capabilities such as interactive supercomputing and user-friendly interfaces to the HPC resources as well as support for containers. In  Lot 1, richness of the software stack and the maturity of programming and computing environment are of major importance. Similarly, efforts to minimise the environmental impact of the new infrastructure will need to be thoroughly taken into account, so that for example at least 95% of the heat produced by the whole compute nodes system needs to be cooled with warm-water cooling and that no other cooling solutions will be considered. A maximum budget of  EUR 144  500 000 is foreseen for this lot.

• Lot 2 relates to the "MareNostrum 5" EuroHPC supercomputer, which will be hosted in and by Barcelona Supercomputer Center – Centro National de Supercomputacion in Spain. This lot foresees the procurement and maintenance of a world-class supercomputer, which will, inter alia, be fully powered with green energy, including heat reuse. Specific requirements for this lot include efficient use of energy as strong efforts on visibility and public outreach, making this EuroHPC system an iconic supercomputer. Marenostrum 5 will be a heterogeneous machine providing service to a large group of user communities. A maximum budget of EUR 151 410 000 is foreseen for this lot.

• Lot 3 concerns the “Leonardo” EuroHPC supercomputer, which will be hosted in Bologna (Italy), in the premises of the new data centre of CINECA, a non-profit consortium, made up of 70 Italian universities, four national research centres and the Ministry of Universities and Research (MIUR).This lot foresees the procurement and maintenance of a new supercomputing system, fostering convergence between HPC and HPCDA and able to run computing and data-intensive workloads. In this regard, the system shall be able to benefit from innovative hardware and software solutions, and the most relevant technology outcomes of European projects, reducing power consumption, improving power management and enhance I/O (Input/Outcput) performance. A maximum budget of EUR 120  000 000 is foreseen for this lot.

One economic operator per lot will be selected for the component(s) acquisition, delivery, assembly, hardware and software installation and maintenance of these supercomputers.  The solutions to be procured are expected to outperform existing solutions regarding several of the following aspects:

• performance/ total cost of ownership
• programmability and usability
• versatility
• system stability
• power and energy efficiency
• computing density

The closing date of the call is 3 January 2020, 17:00 CET / Brussels.

More information can be found in the full tender specifications and all relevant documents are available on the dedicated eTendering webpage, the EU institutions' eProcurement platform. 

Background