Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2025-07-08
Buyer: European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)
Country: IT
Region: ITH55
Contract type: Supplies
CPV classification: 30211100
Submission deadline: 2025-10-15

Technical requirements: The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) intends to issue an Invitation to Tender (ITT) for a new High-Performance Computing Facility (HPCF).
The procurement is intended to meet ECMWF’s high performance computing requirements in two areas. Firstly it should provide a highly-available computational backbone for ECMWF’s time-sensitive numerical weather prediction using both physics and data-driven models. Secondly it should provide resources specifically optimised for the training of machine learning models.
The requirement for a highly-available production service should be met by the phased installation during 2027 of several new HPC clusters in the ECMWF Data Centre in Bologna. The resources for training machine learning models may be provisioned on-premises at the Bologna facility, hosted in a remote data centre, or delivered via public cloud environments.
ECMWF’s intention is to procure the new HPCF by means of a service contract that includes the initial provision of the service, together with full support and other items such as software licences and upgrades, hardware and software maintenance, training and migration assistance as well as options to extend the service in the future in time with additional on-site or off-premise services. The new HPCF is intended to provide a service for a period of five-years.
The main place of performance is at ECMWF's Data Centre.
ECMWF’s existing high performance computing resources were acquired under an agreement that is scheduled to expire at the end of October 2027. The final configuration delivered under this agreement comprises four Atos BullSequana XH2000 systems each with 1920 application nodes based around two socket 64 core AMD Rome processors. More information on ECMWF's current HPCF can be found here: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/computing/our-facilities/supercomputer-facility .
Two workloads drive the HPCF requirement: (i) Physics based modelling and data assimilation based around MPI and OpenMP parallel applications and (ii) Data-driven modelling using the Anemoi framework based around Python and PyTorch; the latter with AI/ML hardware acceleration support.
ECMWF’s intention is to procure the new HPCF by means of a service contract that includes the initial provision of the service, together with full support and other items such as software licences and upgrades, hardware and software maintenance, training and migration assistance as well as options to extend the service in the future in time with additional on-site or off-premise services. The new HPCF will provide the production service to the end of the contract period in 2032. As an operational weather forecasting centre, ECMWF has obligations to provide meteorological products to a tight schedule and strives to be as environmentally responsible as possible.
The highly-available production service for machine learning inference, physics based modelling and data assimilation applications should be met by the phased installation during 2027 of several new HPC clusters in the ECMWF Data Centre in Bologna and will run in parallel with the existing HPCF until the end of current HPCF contract.
Data driven modelling is a rapidly growing part of ECMWF’s strategy so in addition to the on-premises resources for prediction using both physics and data-driven models, ECMWF seeks to procure supplementary resources specifically optimised for the training of machine learning models. These resources may be provisioned on-premises at the Bologna facility, hosted in a remote data centre, or delivered via public cloud environments.
Benchmarks using ECMWF IFS and AIFS codes will be a key part of the evaluation of  systems bid in response to this ITT. Initial IFS and AIFS RAPS benchmarks (RAPS23) have been released. Updates to the benchmark will be released up to the publication of the ITT after which only functional modifications will be allowed. For instructions on accessing the benchmark code please email itt380-benchmarks@groups.ecmwf.int.


Winner: Publications Office of the European Union