Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) subsidiary, SGI, has won a $1.5 million contract from Australia’s scientific research agency, the CSIRO, to supply, install, and maintain a new Advanced Technology Cluster (ATC) at its Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Western Australia.
The contract, which includes software licensing, maintenance and support requirements, installation, and commissioning costs, kicked off on 16 January, and is set to run until mid-January 2020.
The winning supplier, Silicon Graphics Pty Ltd (SGI), which specialises in high performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management, was acquired by HPE late last year for $275 million.
“HPE and SGI believe that by combining complementary product portfolios and go-to-market approaches they will be able to strengthen the leading position and financial performance of the combined business,” SGI said at the time.
The company’s latest win comes more than six months after the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) first went to market for a “suitably qualified and experienced” technology service provider to supply and manage the new ATC at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.
The Perth-based facility is used by the radio astronomy research community in the region, along with high-end researchers in other areas of computational science, including nanotechnology and biotechnology.
The proposed procurement was for a three-year contract with a fixed budget of $1.5 million for an entirely new technology system to replace a decommissioned high-powered system located at the University of Western Australia’s Perth Campus.
According to tender documents, the proposed ATC has two technology components, with the compute nodes in the first component of the system to include at least one Xeon Phi processor.
The second component of the system needs to include at least two GPUs with a Pascal architecture, and at least two host processors with either a Power or an Intel x86 64 bit architecture, according to the documents.
The contract, published on 3 March comes as the CSIRO searches for a technology partner to replace its existing BRAGG supercomputer with a $4 million, one petaflop advanced accelerator compute cluster.
The CSIRO said in procurement documents published in November 2016 that the new system will replace its existing BRAGG high-performance computing cluster, housed within its Information Management and Technology (IMT) Canberra data centre facility.
