Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2024-02-22
Region: UKJ11
Contract type: Supplies
CPV classification: 30211100
Submission deadline: 2025-06-01

Technical requirements: The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by 35 states. ECMWF is both a research institute and a 24/7 operational service, producing and disseminating numerical weather predictions to its Member States. This data is fully available to the national meteorological services in the Member States. The Centre also offers a catalogue of forecast data that can be purchased by businesses worldwide and other commercial customers. The supercomputer facility (and associated data archive) at ECMWF is one of the largest of its type in Europe and Member States can use 25% of its capacity for their own purposes. The organisation was established in 1975 and now employs around 450 staff from more than 30 countries. A description of ECMWF’s activities and infrastructure can be found at: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/what-we-do. 
The purpose of this Request for Information (RFI) is to support ECMWF in gathering information regarding the envisaged supercomputing technology options (roadmaps) and associated price projections that will be available to purchase in a 2026/27 time frame. This information will provide the foundation material to inform the business case justification (including investment) for our next High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF), targeting operational production by Q4/2027.
ECMWF is planning the business case for our future High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) – aiming for a new service to be in operational production by Q4/2027. The purpose of the RFI is to provide ECMWF with insight into the relevant technologies (including indicative cost) which will be available on the market (2026) that provide a stable, robust, and reliable platform(s) to deliver operational forecast production to our Member and Cooperating States (time-critical dependencies) as well as a rich environment to support innovative research in traditional and novel Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) techniques.  ECMWF will be seeking to obtain information on the specification, configuration and costs of the core building blocks components which when combined will provide the HPCF capabilities. Understanding the environmental considerations (e.g. power / cooling) for each component will be essential to ensure these are appropriately factored into the business case.  This includes scenarios to provide enhanced functionality, flexibility, resiliency, and operational efficiencies through hyperscale solutions as well as more traditional approaches.
To support responses to the RFI, a mini-benchmarking suite will be available that simulates our production forecast (Integrated Forecast Suite, IFS) and latest Machine Learning hybrid model (AIFS) requirements, with suitably scaled datasets to run within a single node. Based on core ‘building block’ components of the HPCF, the information from the RFI will enable ECMWF to scale the solution to identify the appropriate level of investment required to deliver our future strategic goals and objectives.
Our high-level timetable is to release the RFI in early March 2024 for ca. 5 weeks; strategic options and benefits presented to ECWMF Technical Committees in October 2024; full business case presented to ECMWF Council in December 2024. Pending approval from Council,  full procurement for new HPCF to commence in H2/2025, with the intention of reaching contract award by Q2/2026 to achieve the target of full operational status by Q4/2027.