Defence seeks supercomputing cluster

The Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) has issued tender documents seeking supercomputer hardware to run its engineering modelling software suites.

It offered up to $250,000 for a “medium-scale high performance computing cluster” capable of performing large-scale, memory-intensive calculations in parallel.

The cluster would be used to model radiation and fluid dynamics using iterative Monte-Carlo simulations, ANSYS Fluent and OpenFOAM software.

As part of the tender process, tenderers were required to run two benchmark cases using ANSYS and OpenFOAM software.

Tender documents stated that the new cluster would “substantially increase the modelling capability of DSTO by significantly reducing the computation time required to model and simulate increasingly complex physics”.

The cluster was expected to be scalable and able to be rack-mounted on DSTO’s full-depth, 19-inch iPAMM server rack with two power distribution units and rack cooling solutions.

DSTO required it to use quad data rate InfiniBand links and high-performance processors – at minimum, 2.66 GHz Intel processors or 2.0 GHz AMD processors.

Tenderers were required to perform all on-site installation and integration work and provide a three-year warranty for all hardware, as well as software support and maintenance for that period.

The contractor would maintain DSTO’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, cluster software environments and management tools, job queuing and messaging systems, and hardware fault diagnostic tools.

DSTO called for the tenderer to have a Melbourne-based office or other means of providing next business day, on-site technical support and scheduled maintenance.

Tender applications were invited until 14 October. DSTO expected to sign the contract by early December.