SURFsara Dutch National Supercomputer

Purpose of this announcement

This announcement is solely for the purpose of notifying SURF’s intention to extend the 'SURFsara Dutch National Supercomputer' contract of which the award notification was released on 11-2-2021.

Because the TenderNed platform is unable to publish a contract modification from the original tender already closed and archived, it was decided to publish this Prior information notice.

The original publication concerning the SURFsara Dutch National Supercomputer took place under notice number in the OJ S: 2020/S 040-094223.

Description of the modifications

SURF will order from its current supplier (Lenovo Global Technology International B.V.) an extension of LISA, the Dutch National Cluster in the Dutch National Supercomputer. As SURF wishes to act transparent and to prevent legal uncertainty (e.g. wishes to prevent an annulment as set out in article 4.15 of the Dutch Procurement Act 2016), SURF therefore makes known by this publication in accordance with article 4.17 of the Dutch Procurement Act 2016 its intention to extend the current contract for the Dutch National Supercomputer with the procurement of extensions to the LISA capacity up to 4 Meuro in total.

The reason for this extension is a modification as set out in article 2.163d of the Dutch Procurement Act 2016.

Need for additional works, services or supplies by the original contractor/concessionaire (Art. 43(1)(b) of Directive 2014/23/EU, Art. 72(1)(b) of Directive 2014/24/EU, Art. 89(1)(b) of Directive 2014/25/EU)

The economic and technical reasons and the inconvenience of cost preventing a change of contractor is as follows:

The replacement as stated in the final Invitation to Tender within the scope of the contract is set out for 2023 in the procurement of CPU's. However, GPU replacement is also necessary and as the use of LISA has taken an unforeseen growth due to the fact that it is demand driven, procurement of the earlier CPU and GPU including management of the clusters can only be executed by the current supplier, SURF has no choice but to have the current supplier execute the GPU replacement and (earlier) CPU/GPU and corresponding storage extensions of LISA. Any change of contractor is not possible for SURF without causing technical problems and incurring substantial costs as it would be way more difficult to integrate the hardware from another vendor inside the Supercomputer management system, core interconnect, storage, and so on. Another architecture and/or system would result in substantial higher CAPEX and OPEX costs.