MINISTRY OF HIGHER & TERTIARY EDUCATION, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT

HEAD OFFICE

REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS

INFORMAL TENDER FOR:

Supply, Delivery and Installation

Of

HIGH PERFOMANCE COMPUTER (HPC) STORAGE SOLUTION

COMPILED BY MHTESTD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Technical Specifications

General Mandatory Requirements

Bid Bond

Instructions to Tenderers

Terms and Conditions

Method of Evaluation

Tender Procedure

1

1.INTRODUCTION

1.1.This RFP was prepared bythe Ministry of Higher & Tertiary Education Science and Technology Development (MHTESTD) and is being offered to suppliers on the clear understanding that its contents are strictly confidential and may not be disclosed to any third party without prior written permission of MHTESTD.

1.2.This document is a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the Supply, Delivery and Installation of HPC Storage Solution for the Ministry of Higher & Tertiary Education, Science & Technology Development (MHTESTD) at the Zimbabwe Centre for High Performance Computing subsequently referred to as ZCHPC.

1.3.The ZCHPC is a research institution that operates under the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development and it is located at University of Zimbabwe, Mt Pleasant Harare. The ZCHPC is a national HPC Centre facility that host a 36 Teraflops supercomputing infrastructure. The supercomputer is used for advanced scientific research in different domains such as science, engineering and business.

1.4.TheZCHPC currently operates a 1660-cores,1952G memory Intel-based Linux cluster (running RHEL) from the vendor Inspur Group of China based on Lustre filesystem and 4 Graphic Nodes installed in early 2014, it comprises 100 regular compute nodes, all connected by a QDR InfiniBand fabric. In addition, a parallel storage system (from NetApp) provides 60TB of usable storage capacity and about 5 GB/s of aggregate read throughput through 8Gb/s Fiber channel connected to object storage server OSS serving QDR InfiniBand. We employ Adaptive Computing-Moab as our resource manager and batch scheduler. The system workload is mixed, but significant usage comes from applications like WRF, TauDEM, Gromacs, Gaussian 09, Cp2k, VASP and Lammps. Other users employ packages such as Fluent, Ansys, Abaqus and Matlab, and a few run their own codes. Our usage over the last 6 months has seen significant growth in large (128+ core) MPI jobs.

1.5.The Ministry intends to expand the ZCHPC storage capacity by 1PB with 30% allocated to scratch and 70% allocated to remote Enterprise user backup storage where:

  1. Scratch must accommodate a wide variety of user computing needs for current and future research activities. In general, we anticipate using the scratch for the handling of various application data from such applications as WRF, MATLAB, Gaussian, etc.
  2. The scratch storage will also host a number of tools and suites for HPC code development, such as those from Intel, PGI, TotalView, and others from the open source community. An integrated Storage billing system is required for charging users based on capacity usage.
  3. The backup solution to make use of our required capacity for such kind of backup/archive activities not limited to applications from the selected customers.
  4. Backup solution must provide filesystem Gateway: a powerful gateway to a vast range of storage technologies and CLOUD, a future-proof solution for the long-term retention needs of an enterprise level data repository.
  5. Software for billing storage clients based on capacity usage should also be part of the backup solution.
  6. Backup software for both the clients and ZCHPC administration that allows automation through policies.
  7. Compliance requirements in this RFP are features, components, performance characteristics, or other properties that are essential to our needs; a vendor must satisfactorily propose all such requirements in order to have its proposal considered responsive. The vendor may discuss additional system features and characteristics it believes may be of value to ZCHPC. If ZCHPC agrees, consideration may be given to them in the evaluation process.

2.THE TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

2.1.In terms of the storage requirements the vendor must connect this storage to our existing HPC cluster using up to 4 ports in the old cluster’s InfiniBand fabric QDR from Mellanox and one Rack with 42U to be provided to accommodate the space. The configuration that must be proposed for the storage system; with at least 11.0 GB/s and in general, storage solutions providing higher density may be preferable due to rack space considerations. Backup Solution should be proposed based on having 0.7PB Storage of capacity as a backup/archive target and need to extend capability to backup/archive all sort of applications whether it is HPC data or Enterprise data.

2.2.The minimum specifications for the solution are tabulated in the compliance sheet below:

ITEM / HPC STORAGE COMPLIANCE SHEET / YES, NO, 3RD PARTY
1 / For the Storage Solution related to ZCHPC Storage Project, the Vendor shall offer the Total Useable Disk Storage Capacity of at least 1 PetaBytes closely coupled to a parallel file system (PFS) that presents a global, consistent Parallel File System name space to the platform, powered by a homogeneous cluster of maximum 1 identical Storage Building Block. The proposed File System technology shall be able grow to over 50 PetaBytes useable per File System.
2 / The Proposed Storage Building Block shall be able to scale up to at least 1.8 PetaBytes Useable as one System based on RAID 6.
3 / One File System shall architecturally support up to 2^64 files within a volume. Useable Disk Storage is defined as the amount of storage that remains after excluding the space used to format the disk drives, RAID parity overhead, metadata, hot spares or spare capacity, and any storage reserved internally by the operating system or the file system.
4 / All HPC Compute Nodes shall see the Storage as one Parallel File System without the need of external storage gateways. An integrated cluster of servers with JBODs / DAS / Internal storage drives shall NOT be accepted.
5 / It is mandatory that each and every Storage Building Block is powered by Enterprise-Class Mirrored, Battery-Backed Write Cache. A scale-out cluster of servers without “Mirrored and Battery-Backed Write Cache” shall NOT be accepted.
6 / The Specialized File System Client provided by the Storage Vendor shall be supported for variety of Operating Systems, concurrently accessing the file system natively, including Windows (Server 2008, 7 Enterprise or Ultimate, Server 2012) and Linux (contemporary SLES and RHEL variants). NFS, CIFS or iSCSI are NOT accepted.
7 / The Specialized File System Client shall support network transfers up to 4MB as opposed to NFS/CIFS, hence decreasing network chatter by orders of magnitude.
8 / The Storage Solution should be able to support NFS/CIFS for non-HPC workloads without any external or gateways
9 / The Storage Solution must be as Green and as Data Centre savvy as possible. The Total Storage for 1 PetaBytes useable shall not require more than 3.5 kW during normal operations and shall occupy less than 12 Rack Units.
10 / The Storage Solution must be Network savvy. The Interconnect for the Total Storage of 1 PetaBytes shall not require more than 4 x InfiniBand FDR 56Gb/s Network Ports - including 100% ports redundancy.
11 / Building Block enclosures connectivity shall be minimum 96Gb/s and redundant, InfiniBand connectivity between enclosures is not needed.
12 / Each Storage Building Block shall be capable to sustain at least ~11.5GB/s (Gigabytes/s) Sustained No Cache with.
13 / Automated Storage Flash Caching must be supported and Application aware: Vendor API shall be provided in order to pre-load & pin data for faster access. This can be proposed as a Value-Add Option for Parallel File System Metadata, Large File Random Access.
14 / The Storage sub-system shall provide Intelligent Cache Management to analyze and optimize I/O traffic in Real Time: aligned, sequential I/O is written through to disk to avoid Mirroring Penalty and to preserve Cache for un-aligned I/O (random IOPs).
15 / The Storage sub-system shall provide Enterprise class Data Integrity features to prevent silent data corruption such as Data Integrity Field (DIF) and / or Parity Check on Read (PCOR).
16 / The Storage sub-system shall offer “Journaled Drive Rebuild” or equivalent capability to accelerate drive rebuild times for recoverable drives by only requiring new/changed blocks to be written to the drive.
17 / The Storage Solution shall be able to connect via an IP network to the HPC Compute Nodes using either 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet (10/40Gb) technology and native InfiniBand FDR (56Gb) connectivity, without the addition of any new component like network adapters, Ethernet / InfiniBand gateways or server, etc.
18 / Specialized LAN File System clients shall support RDMA data access to exploit maximum potential of DMA-enabled networking infrastructure, such as high-speed InfiniBand.
19 / The Storage Solution shall support Centralized configuration and monitoring solution for Storage, Storage Flash Cache & Scale Out File System including system health check, alerts and notifications, aggregated metrics and graphs with selectable time intervals.
20 / The Storage Solution shall be capable of being tightly integrated and replicated to a Vendor Cloud Storage offering, where up to 4 simultaneous copies of the data could be created in a Private Cloud, in order to secure assets on geographically dispersed data and Private Cloud Users can access the data whenever needed for editing or running a Job on the HPC Solution
21 / The File System proposed by the Storage Vendor shall support Non Disruptive Scaling, Restriping and Rebalancing.
22 / The File System proposed by the Storage Vendor shall independently support either scale-out (Performance) OR scale-up (Capacity) storage model, guaranteeing improved performance as storage resources are added.
23 / The File System proposed by the Storage Vendor shall support parallel defragmentation for high-speed storage re-alignment and performance optimization. The initial performance shall be guaranteed as the File System ages, as the File System fragments and as the File System is 99% full.
24 / The Storage Solution Vendor should provide reference names with the Top100® supercomputing Centers.
25 / The Storage Solution Vendor should provide an exhaustive training in two parts each lasting a minimum of 5 days.
  1. Pre-installation – this is to be done at an environment where the vendor provided a similar solution
  2. Post-installation- this is to be done at the ZCHPC site
This is part of the skills transfer between the vendor engineers and ZCHPC staff.
26 / The Storage Solution Vendor should have a billing System to charge the remote users per Storage Capacity consumption.
27 / The File System proposed by the Storage Vendor shall support granular file and directory locking for high-speed concurrent file updates, quality of read / write, policy-based management.
28 / The File System proposed by the Storage Vendor shall support Identity Management such as UID/GID Mapping, AD Integration, ACL Translation.
29 / The File System proposed by the Storage Vendor shall support native, built-in policy based data migration and transparent file movement across varying tiers of disk-based and tape-based storage while exposing a single, global namespace.
30 / The File System proposed by the Storage Vendor shall support Up to 256 copy on write snapshots per file system.
31 / The File System proposed by the Storage Vendor shall support system quotas control storage utilization.
32 / The File System proposed by the Storage Vendor shall support compression of data
33 / The Backup Solution shall provide Universal and Transparent Access via NFS\CIFS, access is possible from ANY platform into the network through standard NFS\CIFS protocol without installing any specific agent or plugin.
34 / The Backup Enterprise Solution should support Multiple Operating System Support (Windows, Linux, UNIX).
35 / The Backup Solution should have Retention management to meet internal governance and compliance
36 / The Backup Solution should support Multiple Storage technologies support (Tape, HDD, Object, Optical, CLOUD)
37 / The Backup Solution should support No File Size Limitation and Billions of Files.
38 / The Backup Solution should make Cross Technology Media Copy (e.g. from Object Storage to Tape) The data can be archived on one technology and copied automatically to new storage, either in a proprietary file system or in a standard one (e.g. NTFS or S3).
39 / The Vendor should provide backup software capable of performing automatic scheduled backups.
40 / A warranty period should exceed one year.
41 / All the technical documentation (data sheets and manuals) must be in English and the Vendor should have a reputable and referenced after sale support.

3.GENERAL MANDATORY REQUIREMENTS

3.1.Tenderers are required to pay a non-refundable fee of USD10.00 for the RFP that will be issued at MHTESTD.

3.2.Tenderers must submit their Company's profile, CR 14(local companies) and Certificate of incorporation and International Players must provide relevant company registration documentation. The bidder must have been incorporated for two years or more. Those with less than two years will not be accepted.

3.3.Tenderers must provide full references and this reference information provided shall include at least the following:

  1. Name of the client
  2. Contact person from that organization in charge of the project (name, title, telephone number and e- mail address of this person).
  3. Explain in general terms what was provided
  4. Provide the number of years your company has been in business, Type of business structure (sole-proprietorship, partnership, corporation, or other), number of employees within the company and annual sales volume company wide.
  5. Is your company currently in default on any loan agreement or financing agreement with any bank, financial institution, or other entity? If yes, specify date(s), circumstances, and prospects for resolution.
  6. Is your company currently for sale or involved in any transaction to expand or to become acquired by another business entity? If yes, please explain the impact both in organizational and directional terms.
  7. A bid validity period of 90 days should be stated. Failure to state Bid Validity period will lead to automatic disqualification.
  8. Bid must be registered with ZIMRA. Bidders must submit proof of Registration with ZIMRA in the form of valid Tax Clearance Certificate or VAT Registration Certificate. 10% withholding Tax shall be applied for foreign bidders.

4.BID BOND

4.1.Option 1

4.1.1.Tenders must provide a Bid Bond of 2.5% of tender value up to a maximum of US$5,000 (for local bidders) or 10% (for international bidders) endorsed by a registered Commercial Bank to MHTESTD when submitting their tender. This is to cover MHTESTD in case the supplier withdraws the bid after submission, or is unable to honour his/her proposal after award of tender.

4.1.2.Please note: that the required Bid Bond should include the following features in order for it to be considered valid:-

a)Letter head of a registered Commercial Bank (i.e. the Supplier of the Bid Bond/Surety).

b)The Header to clearly state that it is a Bid Security Bond.

c)Purpose of the Bid Bond to be clearly stated.

d)The date when the Common Seal of the said Surety was effected to be stated.

e)Conditions of the said Obligation to be stated.

f)The physical address of the Surety to be stated.

g)A bid bond validity of 90 days is required and must be clearly stated.

h)Signature of Surety and the date when it was endorsed to be clearly shown.

i)It must be an original document and date stamped.

NB:Bonds from Insurance Companies, Building Societies, Insurance Brokers and Stock Brokers will not be accepted

4.1.3.The Bid Bonds of the unsuccessful bidders will be released immediately after award of Tender while that of the winning bidder will only be released after submission of the Performance Bond.

4.2.Option 2

4.2.1.Payment of a non-refundable bid security of US$280.00 (for local bidders) or US$750.00 (for international bidders) payable to the State Procurement Board. Attach the original receipt to the bid as proof of payment.

4.2.2.After award of the tender, and before the contract is signed, the winning bidder must produce an adequate form of security acceptable to MHTESTD to guarantee that the work will be continued in case of failure of performance by the supplier, i.e. in the event of delay in the delivery of the goods or failure to meet performance requirements, including latent defects. This guarantee will be in the form of a Performance Bond equivalent to the value of 10% of the total cost of the supplier's proposal, valid for the period of the contract and endorsed by a registered Commercial Bank.

4.2.3.Bidders must bid for only one option, that is, multiple options will not be allowed for this tender. Where options are registered, only the first option shall be considered.

4.2.4.Bidders must submit proof of dealership arrangement with the manufacturer.

NB:Failure to meet mandatory requirements will lead to automatic disqualification.

5.INSTRUCTIONS TO TENDERERS

5.1. RESPONSES FORMAT

i.Supplier’s response must have a contents page to facilitate ease of reference to information submitted.

ii.Responses to this RFP should be in the form of paragraphs numbered with the same numbers as the original statements/instructions and/or repeat the text of the statements/instructions.

5.2.TECHNICAL INFORMATION FORMAT

5.2.1.Please give full details of the following in line with the requested technical specifications and solution requirement:

  1. Proposed Hardware;
  2. Technical Support;

5.2.2.For Proposed Hardware and Software:

5.2.2.1.Please give full details ofStorage Solution: (See full minimum requirements in line with the technical specification compliance sheet in section 2).For any other hardware:

  1. Manufacturer and model;
  2. Performance characteristics

5.2.3.For Technical support: Please give full details of:

  1. Availability of telephone support;
  2. Guaranteed response time ;
  3. Fault escalation procedure.

5.3.DELIVERY FORMAT

5.3.1.Please specify maximum delivery lead time;