The US Department of Defense (DoD) has invited applications from companies interested in upgrading some of its supercomputing systems.
The contract opportunity is a Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA) for "interested firms with the capability to on-ramp onto an existing suite of BOAs for supercomputer Technology Insertions in support of the High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP)."
The suite of supercomputers in question is housed at the US Army Research Laboratory in Maryland, the US Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center in Mississippi, the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio, and the US Navy DSRC in Mississippi.
According to the contract opportunity, the existing BOAs have a current capacity of $369.75 million and were established in 2021 with a five-year life cycle ceasing in October 2026.
The tender is designed to aid the DoD HPCMP's 'mission,' described as being to "accelerate the development and transition of advanced defense technologies into superior warfighting capabilities by exploiting and strengthening US leadership in supercomputing, communications, and computational modeling."
At each of the four locations, the DoD estimates that it will invest $68.75m per year with five one-year options for administration and maintenance support of the supercomputers valued at $2.75m per year.
Proposals are due by November 3rd, and to be considered companies must be a US-based OEM (original equipment manufacturer).
Additionally, the solution should target a high ratio of peak CPU memory bandwidth to floating point capability, 256GB to 4TB of RAM per compute node, a minimum of 512 total compute nodes, and an interconnect with each link having a minimum of 100 Gbps of bandwidth among many other constraints.
The supercomputers due to be upgraded are not named in the contract opportunity, though based on the dates and location information included in the opportunity it may include the two Penguin Computing supercomputers announced in 2021 and housed at the Navy DSRC and Air Force DSRC.
