Contracts Awarded in Final Phase of PRACE PCP

CINECA, PRACE Hosting Member for Italy, is pleased to announce that three contractors were awarded in the third and final phase of its Pre-commercial Procurement (PCP).

PRACE started this pre-commercial procurement (PCP) to obtain R&D services which should result in future PRACE HPC systems to become more energy efficient.

The process is highly competitive, and during Phase II the three companies produced early prototypes. All of them were invited to bid for Phase III during which the pilot for the three promising solutions will be built and deployed at the hosting centres.

The awarded bidders are:

• BULL SAS
• E4 Computer Engineering SpA
• Maxeler Technologies Ltd.

The third phase of the execution stage is expected to end in December 2017.

PRACE started the process for a pre-commercial procurement on Whole-System Design for Energy Efficient HPC in 2012 with a workshop on the usage of Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) in HPC. This Pre-Commercial Procurement, the first one in the field of HPC in Europe, is a multi-country and multi-partner joint effort, implemented by a consortium composed of several partners of PRACE (CINECA (Italy) as Procuring Entity with CSC (Finland), EPCC (UK), JSC (Germany) and GENCI (France)). PRACE aisbl is involved as an advisory body in this Pre-Commercial Procurement pilot executed in the context of PRACE’s 3rd Implementation Project (PRACE-3IP) supported by the European Commission.

About PRACE

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are provided by 5 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, CSCS representing Switzerland, GCS representing Germany and GENCI representing France). The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement RI-312763 and from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (2014-2020) under grant agreement 653838.