Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2017-11-14
Buyer: UK Shared Business Services Limited
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 72212000: Platform-specific software programming services | 72212980 | 72230000: Custom software development services | 72253000: Helpdesk and support services | 72260000: Software-related services

Technical requirements: The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council manages the ARCHER supercomputer service on behalf of the high performance computing (HPC) scientific user communities. This multi-million pound investment, which commenced service in 2013, provides national capability for scientific research across the HEI sector requiring access to high performance computing resources. Supporting a community of academic researchers across the UK, ARCHER provides a prestigious national Tier 1 compute resource for scientific endeavour. As provider of the national HPC service supporting researchers in diverse scientific fields, EPSRC currently manages the provision and support of the ARCHER service.
A future capital investment will secure the next generation of HPC service and ensure provision of new HPC architecture capable of addressing the demands of increasing complexity in scientific research.
The overall vision for ARCHER2 is to build on the existing Tier 1 and Tier 2 investments in national HPC facilities so that the UK is a recognised leader on the international scene for computational science and engineering. In order to achieve this, UK researchers must be able to carry out internationally competitive research across the remits of EPSRC, NERC and beyond.
The benefits of the UK being world leading in computational science and engineering will be realised through:
— the increased ability of UK researchers to make valuable contributions to the solution of complex scientific challenges and to the generation of quality scientific outputs;
— increased attractiveness of UK researchers as partners in high profile international collaborations and improved access to large HPC resources in other countries.
EPSRC, as managing agent for the national HPC facility on behalf of the other Research Councils, is looking to tender contracts for three elements of the ARCHER facility in 2018: the hardware (based in Edinburgh), the service provision which manages academic access to the facility and the helpdesk, and the computational science and engineering (CSE) support which provides training and support to users of the facility to enable their codes to run as effectively as possible.
The role of the CSE Provider in an integrated ARCHER2 Service is to provide software maintenance and development, user engagement and outreach, support and training in order to enable researchers and user communities to effectively and efficiently utilise ARCHER2 HPC resources for scientific research and enquiry.
The ARCHER CSE support will be responsible for: integration with technology (in conjunction with the hardware and service providers), supporting the user community in developing and optimising the scientific codes that they will run on the ARCHER2 service, resolving user code problems, and providing comprehensive technical training for users across Tier 1 and integrating with the EPSRC Tier 2 HPC layer.
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