PRACE Completes First Phase of Pre-Commercial Procurement

PRACE is pleased to announce that Phase I of its Pre-commercial Procurement (PCP) was completed on 9 March 2015.

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 I the companies Bull, E4, Maxeler and Megware explored the various possible solutions. All of them have now been invited to bid for Phase II during which prototypes for the three most promising solutions will be built. This phase is expected to start in May 2015.

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 (see: http://www.prace-ri.eu/workshop-on-the-usage-of-pre-commercial-procureme...).

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 4 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, 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. For more information, see www.prace-ri.eu

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