Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science invites Global Tenders for A SUPERCOMPUTER. The bids are to be submitted in Two-Bid pattern i.e. Technical Bid and Price Bid in two separate sealed covers distinctly marked accordingly and both to be put inside another envelope, which should be sealed and superscribed with tender reference no., due date and time of opening. Two bids i.e. Technical Bid and Price Bid should be identical in all respect except that the Technical Bid should have blank space at the places where prices have been stated in the Price Bid 

          The technical bids will be opened first to evaluate technical specifications of the equipment and there after the price bids of only the technically qualified companies will be opened.  

All bidders will have to supply the timing and results (output file) of benchmarks programs both on the CPU and on the GPU including full details of compiler options hardware and interconnect of the machine (which should be as similar as possible to the proposed machine) on which the benchmark was run. (The benchmark programs cpu_benchmark.tgz &  gpu_benchmark.tgz  may be downloaded  ). The benchmark program for the CPU has to be run using both MPI and OpenMP parallelization. Timings for at least five runs with different number of threads have to be included with the technical bid. Softcopy of the output files for all the different runs should also be submitted as an appendix to the bid. The supplied benchmark program with the given input file must run under 25 minutes on 5 - 6% of the number of proposed CPU compute cores and under 22 minutes on 10 - 12% of the number of proposed CPU compute cores. The vendors are not allowed to modify any part of the program without prior consent from IACS, nor should they use any compiler option that compromises double precision accuracy. 

The GPU program (a CUDA C program) should be run a single GPU (of the same make as the one proposed) and its run timing should also be submitted. Failure to supply any of the above information will automatically result in disqualification of the bid. The selected vendor will have to reproduce the benchmark results on the machine supplied to IACS at the time of installation for successful completion of the installation process. 

Last date for submission of the tender is 02.00 PM on 30th November, 2011 in the office of the Registrar, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Jadavpur, Kolkata – 700032  

Pre-bid meeting will be held on 15th November, 2011 at 11.00AM at SN Bose Meeting Hall. 

Technical Bids will be opened on 30th November, 2011 at 03.00PM at SN Bose Meeting Hall in the presence of intending bidders or their representatives. 

Evaluation of Technical Bids will be held on 2nd December 2011 at 02.00 PM at SN Bose Meeting Hall. The bidders may send their representatives who will be able to clarify technical aspects of their bids, if any, required by the Technical Evaluation Team. Please note that IACS will not provide any accommodation or expenses to any of the bidders for attending pre-bid meeting, opening of technical bid or for attending meeting during technical bid evaluation. 

Opening of price-bid: The Price Bids of the bidders qualifying the technical bid will only be opened, the date of which will be intimated to the short-listed bidders at their email addresses. The rest of the bids will be rejected. 

 IACS Machine Requirements: 

1. Given the different kinds of problems which are being tackled by the various researchers a versatile machine is needed which can cater to everybody's needs. In particular the machine must be able to provide a standard linux x86_64 environment.  

2. Graphical Processing Units provide hitherto unprecedented performance to price ratio and are of great help in certain programs. The supercomputer therefore must have GPU cards. 

3. Parallel jobs typically require exclusive usage of resources. Therefore there must be facilities for partitioning the machine at the software/queue level. 

4. While the current machine might have only about a couple of thousand processing cores, it is envisaged that future upgradations/additions might enhance the number of processors to tens of thousands. Since this facility must have the capacity to run a single massively parallel program using all processors, the interconnect must scale to that level as well. 

5. Quantum chemistry problems often require very high (terabytes) amounts of data storage at intermediate steps. Thus the machine should have a parallel file system capable of fast read/write of data. 

6.  There must be scope for adding more computing power to the machine. If the current configuration is one cabinet/rack there must be scope for adding more cabinets/racks. 

7.  The machine must be easily upgradable in terms of processor, GPU cards, memory and interconnect. 

Detailed Technical Specifications: 

 1) x86_64 compute processors with clock speed  > 2 GHz. 

2) Standard linux environment capable of running binaries compiled with GNU compilers on x86_64 machines. 

3) At least 15 TeraFlops of peak computing power from CPUs. 

4) At least 20 TeraFlops of peak computing power from GPUs. 

5) At least 2 GB of 1,333 MHz DDR3 memory per CPU core. 

6) At least 6 GB of GDDR5 memory per GPU card. 

7) Interconnect scaling at least upto 10,000 (ten thousand) cores.  

8) Parallel file system with RAID and > 100 TB of storage space. 

9) Parallel file system with  > 3 GigaBytes/sec bandwidth. 

10) Compilers for Fortran, C and C++ (both openMP and MPI versions) 

11) Scalable LAPACK and BLAS libraries.  

12) CUDA compiler for GPU's. 

13) PGI compiler suite including PGI accelerator compilers (Fortran, C and C++). 

14) Load leveller and batch queues for job submission. 

15) Performance analysis tools (also for multi-threaded programs). 

16) Supercomputer management tools. 

17) The total power consumption of the machine has to be less than 70 kiloWatts. 

18) Three years warranty including installation and on-site maintenance. 

General Instructions: 

1.             The selected vendor will have to reproduce the benchmark results on the machine supplied to IACS at the time of installation for successful completion of the installation process.

2.                 Incomplete tenders will be summarily rejected without assigning any reasons thereof.

3.                 Tenders received after the due date will be rejected.

4.                 At any time prior to the bid due date, IACS may, for any reason, whether at its own initiative or in response to a clarification requested by a prospective bidder during pre-bid meeting, modify the bidding documents.  The amendment(s) will be notified on the Institute website.  Prospective bidders are advised to occasionally visit the website for any amendment.

5.                 For any clarifications/queries, please contact Dr. Pushan Majumdar (Email id - tppm [AT] iacs.res.in).

6.                 IACS reserves the right to reject any or all tenders received without assigning any reason thereof.

Dr. Utpal Sadhu
(Registrar)