Scientific Processing and Intensive Compute Environment (SPICE)

The subject of this Procurement is the provision of a highly scalable compute and storage environment to meet the growing needs of Met Office scientific research and post HPC model data processing.

The solution sought by the Met Office, implies a complete shift in current IT provisioning methodology, with new ways of delivering compute and storage resources to the business. The Met Office recognises the risk that this brings, but anticipates the benefits of innovation outweighs this generating major savings, and allowing better agility for business and science development. In recognition of this risk, the scope of the SPICE project has been split into three distinct phases. Over the lifetime of the project it is the Met Office’s intention to select a Tenderer for all phases of this project to best meet the ongoing requirements. However, the Met Office is only seeking to contractually commit to Phase 1 as part of this initial ITT process.

You are invited to submit a Tender to address this need which will serve Met Office Science through to the end of the decade.

Included in the scope of this procurement are:

• Supply, installation, & configuration of the systems comprising of hardware, firmware & software.
• Commissioning & acceptance over seen by the Met Office.
• Continued system support & services for the period defined.
• Provision of relevant staff training.