Calder Tender Release
Today we released the tender for our next HPC system – Calder.
The tender is published on the SSSNA lot 5 system and up to 13 vendors who are preapproved on the list can bid.
SSSNA Lot 5 Resellers
Most of the vendors are integrators and service providers, so they will partner with the OEMs, such as Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Penguin.
The vendors have until 8th June to reply, and we’d expect to be placing an order in early August with the winning bidder. Delivery and installation will be over the winter and production of the system should be early Spring 2026.
They will be bidding on the cluster itself along with the services to maintain it. The cluster value alone is £3.6M compared with Aire’s £2.4M.
The configuration we have asked for is that it should be roughly 50% of the budget being spent on CPUs and 50% on GPUs, with the stipulation that we prefer FP64 capable GPUs, (e.g. NVIDIA’s H & B series) and that they should maximise the CPU cores and the TFlops for the system.