DOC NOAA Research and Development (R&D) High Performance Computing System (HPCS) Notice of Intent to Sole-Source

The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) intends to negotiate on a noncompetitive basis with Raytheon Company (Raytheon) of Garland, Texas to provide an additional "bridge" of six months, 01 October 2010 through 31 March 2011, of service of the existing high performance computing (HPC) system being leased by the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) under contract DG133H-07-CN-0002. The HPC system is the sum of three subsystems located at three locations: in IBM's Business Continuity and Recovery Services facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, NJ, and the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, CO. This synopsis serves to notify the public of the proposed contract action. The Government intends to modify the existing contract to acquire an additional six months of processing capability, storage, networking, software, services and facility housing/services in support of research and development activities associated with the R&D HPCS program. The existing HPC system was designed by Raytheon to provide a balanced supercomputing environment that includes not only large-scale computing but disk storage and tape storage with associated infrastructure to access existing data archives. At Boulder, NOAA has three computing clusters. The first system, W-jet, has 1,456 Intel Woodcrest cores, the second system, H-jet, has 2,016 Intel Harpertown cores, and the third system, N-jet has 3,584 Intel Nehalem cores. Boulder has 142 TB of disk storage and 1 AML/J tape library. NOAA has two clusters located at the IBM facility in Gaithersburg which are comprised of 2,736 cores. The first cluster consists of IBM P5 cores and the second cluster consists of IBM P6 cores. There are 329 TB of raid storage and 3 STK Powderhorn tape libraries (11.3 PB). At Princeton, NOAA has 7,790 SGI cores comprised of both Montecito and Montvale architectures. Princeton has 2 SGI nodes that are dedicated to post processing activities and 9 SGI nodes dedicated to batch processing. Princeton has 437 TB of raid disk storage, 5 STK Powderhorn tape libraries (13.5 PB), and one SL8500 tape library. The HPC systems currently utilized by NOAA directly supports NOAA's strategic goals in climate, weather and water by enabling its research into the physical processes governing the Earth's weather, climate and ocean. The HPC systems must provide a continuation of operational performance at least equivalent to the existing system, and meet the current dependability standard of 97% system availability and 99% scientific data availability guarantee for the Gaithersburg and Boulder subsystems, and 95% system availability and 95% scientific data availability at the Princeton subsystem. The HPC system must be fully supported by system administrators and maintenance provided on a 7X24 basis. The HPC system must continue to support full integration with the existing tape archival subsystems. In addition, the HPC system must be integrated into each subsystem's local area network and wide area network, supported by industry standard communications hardware/software. The estimated budget for the additional six months of system and facility utilization is approximately $6.6 million. NOAA anticipates leasing the hardware and software and purchasing services under fixed-price terms. Six months of maintenance (7X24) and support services must be included in the acquisition. Vendors who believe they can satisfy the Government's requirements are invited to submit an affirmative response. To be considered an affirmative response, vendors must submit written data and documentation which demonstrates and ability to furnish a production-ready system capable of meeting the previously cited requirements and a facility to support that system. Seamless integration of the HPC system into the existing infrastructure is required. Of particular concern to the Government is accomplishment of system integration with zero disruption of current R&D activities. Vendors must include in their response an explanation, in detail, of its plan to implement and manage integration with the existing HPC and communications systems. All responsible sources must submit a written narrative statement of capability including detailed technical information and other technical literature sufficient to permit agency analysis in order to determine a bona fide capability to meet the requirements. A determination by the Government not to open the requirement for competition based upon responses to this notice is solely within its discretion. Affirmative responses must be received within 15 days after publication of this synopsis.