HPCMP TI-16 BOA PRE-SOLICITATION ANNOUNCEMENT 1. The U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center in Huntsville (CEHNC) is issuing this pre-solicitation announcement to current BOA Holders and interested firms with capability to on-ramp onto an existing suite of Basic Ordering Agreements (BOAs) for supercomputer Technology Insertions (TIs) in support of the High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). In order to qualify for this opportunity, the company must successfully display that they have the qualifications to accomplish the work that will be outlined in the upcoming solicitation, which will be posted for a period of 45 days in accordance with (IAW) Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 5.203(d). The BOA solicitation will include a Request for Proposal (RFP) to become a Basic Ordering Agreement Holder based on technical qualifications, and then successful BOA holders will compete for the individual orders using the BOA terms and conditions. The existing CEHNC HPCMP BOAs have a total capacity of $330 Million, with a remaining capacity of $139M. The existing BOA suite was established in June 2013 with a 5 year life cycle, ceasing in June 2018. This notice is an invitation to any size business concern to provide a capability statement in response to this requirement. This announcement does not obligate the Government to award a contract nor does it obligate the Government to pay for any preparation costs. This pre-solicitation announcement is not a REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS nor does it restrict the Government as to the ultimate acquisition approach. The RFP and resulting solicitation is currently expected to be posted to Federal Business Opportunities (FedBizOpps.Gov) on or around 11 March 2016. 2. At this time there are THREE anticipated BOA orders to be solicited for Technical Insertions (TI) at separate Department of Defense (DoD) facilities within the Continental United States (US), with two at the Army Research Lab (ARL) DOD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) and a second at the Engineer Research & Development Center (ERDC) DSRC. The Government anticipates soliciting these three TI systems as discrete orders against HNC TI BOAs. The proposed system must be a balanced, commercially-available, production-grade HPC system that contains an appropriate combination of processor, memory, interconnect, disk input/output (I/O), and operating system (OS) capabilities in order to execute complex, tightly-coupled, large-scale, scientific calculations; more specifically, the system must be able to successfully execute a variety of workloads, including jobs which stress all subsystems and which require the simultaneous, tightly-coupled use of the full number of compute nodes within the system. 3. Scope and Authority. The HPCMP is the world-class provider of high performance computing capabilities for the U.S. DoD. CEHNC and HPCMP have formally teamed to establish a path forward for future HPCMP requirements. This pre-solicitation announcement seeks to evaluate industry's ability to provide sustainable, state-of-the-art, HPC capability for the DoD research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) community. This requirement is in direct support of the DoD HPCMP's mission - to accelerate the development and transition of advanced defense technologies into superior warfighting capabilities by exploiting and strengthening U.S. leadership in supercomputing, communications, and computational modeling. The HPCMP continues to enhance its ability to support DoD and the warfighter through the acquisition of balanced HPC systems for five DSRCs. The Government is interested in uncovering industry's ability to deliver balanced, commercially-available, production-grade HPC systems, which contain an appropriate combination of processor, memory, disk I/O, interconnect, and operating system (OS) capabilities in order to conduct complex, tightly-coupled, large-scale, scientific calculations. Salient system attributes include: - A reasonably high byte to floating point operation (FLOP) count ratio (when comparing peak CPU memory bandwidth to peak CPU floating point capability), - 2GB to 3GB of memory capacity per computational core, - At least 50GB/s, 50GB/s, and 75GB/s of read, write, and full duplex bandwidth (respectively) between the compute and I/O subsystems for every 1,000 computational nodes in the system, - At least 20GB per core, 20GB per core, and 0.5GB per core of formatted usable disk storage for /work1, /work2, and /home (respectively), - A tightly integrated interconnect with - Each link having at least 40Gb/s of network bandwidth - An end-to-end latency that is less than 5's (five microseconds), - A well-tuned OS with low jitter. 4. The most applicable North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) code is 334111, Electronic Computer Manufacturing. The small business size standard is 1,000 employees. 5. In order for a non-current CEHNC HPCMP TI BOA Holder to participate in this solicitation and be considered for award, the interested firm must submit a form DD 2345, completed and signed by the appropriate authority at each of the sites where the installations will occur. This is necessary to receive a benchmarking suite detailing the technical requirements of this solicitation. Further information will be provided via an amendment to this pre-solicitation notice when it becomes available. ***EDIT*** The form DD2345 is processed through the Defense Logistics Agency. Please visit the website https://www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp/ and follow the instructions for approval to access unclassified data. Approved forms are to be submitted to Richard Himebrook at Richard.G.Himebrook@usace.army.mil. There is no deadline for submission, however it is necessary information for offerors to prepare a proposal. Interested parties are responsible for a timely submission in order to receive the benchmarking suite. A POC and address are required along with the DD2345 for mail receipt of the Benchmarking suite. 6. An Industry Day meeting will be held at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Huntsville Center Office. A tentative date is currently 28 March 2016. A firm date will be provided in the official solicitation.
