Italy – Super computer – Procurement of a High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF)

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) intends to issue an Invitation to Tender (ITT) for a new High-Performance Computing Facility (HPCF). The procurement is intended to meet ECMWF’s high performance computing requirements in two areas. Firstly it should provide a highly-available computational backbone for ECMWF’s time-sensitive numerical weather prediction using both physics and data-driven models. Secondly it should provide resources specifically optimised for the training of machine learning models. The requirement for a highly-available production service should be met by the phased installation during 2027 of several new HPC clusters in the ECMWF Data Centre in Bologna. The resources for training machine learning models may be provisioned on-premises at the Bologna facility, hosted in a remote data centre, or delivered via public cloud environments. ECMWF’s intention is to procure the new HPCF by means of a service contract that includes the initial provision of the service, together with full support and other items such as software licences and upgrades, hardware and software maintenance, training and migration assistance as well as options to extend the service in the future in time with additional on-site or off-premise services. The new HPCF is intended to provide a service for a period of five-years.