D8.1.1: Technical Specifications for the PCP and for Phase 1

Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) is a new model of procurement that is being promoted by the European Commission (EC) and gaining usage in many European Union member states in order to foster new innovative products prior to their commercial release, especially in the IT market and reduce the gap between Europe and countries like USA.
HPC has been identified as an area where it should be used and where basic R&D coupled with PCP can drive European innovation.
In the PRACE-3IP project, a consortium of partners called the Group of Procurers (GoP) will launch a joint Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) pilot on “Whole System Design for Energy Efficient HPC“ addressing one of the major obstacles towards future multi-Petascale supercomputers. It will be the first time in Europe that such a PCP procedure will be used in the field of HPC. For the partners involved in this exercise it will represent a clear assessment of the potential of such procedure for future procurements.
The goal of the PCP is to drive innovation towards HPC solutions, which on the one hand are suitable for operation within the PRACE infrastructure of leadership class systems for scientific computing, and on the other hand significantly improves on energy efficiency. The formulated technical requirements define minimum requirements with respect to the performance of such leadership systems. Bidders are given the freedom to propose different solutions with respect to how to achieve improvements in terms of energy efficiency. This increases the openness and attractiveness of this PCP to SMEs, who may wish to provide highly innovative solutions that concern only parts of an overall system design.
PCP aims to foster innovation for economic growth to ensure sustainable high-quality public services in Europe. The PCP framework has been devised to enable public procurers to source research and development services in a competitive and open manner, bringing the best solutions to the public agencies running the procurement. The research and development services must result in pilot systems that demonstrate that the outcome meets the set of technical requirements.
In the previous PRACE projects, PRACE-PP, PRACE-1IP and PRACE-2IP, the development and purchasing of prototype technologies that may subsequently be deployed within the PRACE-RI has been undertaken by the successful prototyping-oriented work packages. These work packages, supported at times by the work of the legal-aspects work packages, have successfully implemented a series of prototyping activities, where appropriate using co-design approaches to technology development with external suppliers and existing procurement processes. Considerable existing knowledge and experience has already been gained and shared between partners.
During the first six months of the current PRACE-3IP project, the Group of Procurers detailed the specification of these technical requirements based on the overall goals as described in the project proposal. “Whole System Design for Energy Efficient HPC” has been chosen as the focus of this PCP because of the need to take a holistic approach to technology developments in HPC as we approach the multi-Petascale and Exascale eras. Simply optimising one component of the system, be it cooling system, processor or memory, will not deliver the necessary reduction in energy usage we will require in the next decade to operate HPC systems at the pinnacle of performance.
Through advertising in targeted mailing lists and websites, PRACE encouraged interested suppliers to participate in an open technical dialogue. A public meeting was held in Brussels and subsequent feedback received from those who expressed an interest in the dialogue. The feedback resulting from this process has been invaluable in finalising the technical requirements of the forthcoming procurement.
These finalised technical requirements have been used to form the tender documents for the PCP and these will constitute the core of the subsequent public tender. To compare the different bids, evaluation criteria have been derived based on these technical requirements, and will be used as a part of the tendering process. Here we present detailed explanations and justifications for the technical criteria PRACE has selected for the PCP.