Question:
Considering the tender was released just before the Easter break and other associated school holidays many people have been away or still are until after May day.

Can we get an extension on the close date please? Thanks in advance.

Answered on 01/May/2025 11:29 AM:


Good Morning

An extension to the RFI closing date has been granted. Please find attached Addendum No. 01 for further information.

Question:
Will the commercial agreement be with DPI or DETSI directly noting the procurement contact is from DPI.

Answered on 08/May/2025 07:24 AM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.1 for details in response to your question.

Question:
Please provide an architecture diagram of the current system, including 1/ network connectivity from corporate network (science DMZ or similar) for user access from Windows desktops and terminals, 2/ High performance computing and interconnect, 3/ High performance storage infrastructure that is being implemented, 4/ Mass data storage and 5/ any networks or infrastructure in place for cloud service providers, as mentioned in the requirements.

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:44 PM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.2 for details in response to your question.

Question:
Can you please provide a usage profile (such as batch scheduler job statistics) over an extended period (6 months to a year) for the existing HPC cluster nodes, large memory nodes and accelerator enabled nodes?

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:43 PM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.2 for details in response to your question.

Question:
Lease and as-a-service/consumption-based option: Please estimate roughly the number of FTE person days per year spent by DETSI personnel and contractors on management and monitoring of hardware, patching or upgrading firmware, operating systems and middleware, management of operating systems and middleware, capacity planning, upgrade planning, user downtime management related to facilitating these items.

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:44 PM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.2 for details in response to your question.

Question:
Can you please describe the data entities used in your analysis and their associated data classification against the Queensland Government Information Security Classification Framework (QGISCF).

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:44 PM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.2 for details in response to your question.

Question:
For the existing 1.5 PB usable high performance storage 1/ What is your current capacity utilisation rate? 2/ What is the projected data growth rate for the next 3-5 years? 3/ Is that any separate tiers for hot/warm/cold data (i.e. flash, HDD)? 4/ what's the typical I/O pattern (random vs sequential)? 5/ What's the read/write ratio of the applications?

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:45 PM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.2 for details in response to your question.

Question:
Regarding the existing 27PB mass storage environment with 117M files , please share 1/ the file size histogram or distribution curve 2/ what's the ratio between your largest and smallest files? 3/ Any significant outliers that might skew the average? 3/ Are there specific file types that contribute to storage requirement?

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:45 PM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.2 for details in response to your question.

Question:
Regarding the data movement from high performance storage to the mass storage: 1/ What triggers data movement from high performance storage to mass storage? 2/ What is the mechanism that moves the data? 3/ What is the typical age of data on the high performance storage before it's moved to mass storage? 4/ How do you currently identify data ready for archival?“

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:45 PM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.2 for details in response to your question.

Question:
Regarding archived data access from mass storage 1/ how frequently do you need to retrieve data from mass storage? 2/ what is the typical size of data retrieval requests and total volume transferred?

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:46 PM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.2 for details in response to your question.

Question:
• Preferred OS/Distro?

• Preferred job scheduler/resource manager?

• Preferred cluster frameworks?

• Will containerisation be used (ie kubernetes)?

• Other software stacks?

• Which accelerators are required?

• How many accelerators per system / per installation?

• Which software will utilise the GPU compute?

• What is the drive requirement for base nodes?

• Is tape still required or will it go obsolete once migrated?

• Can they supply more technical info on the storage requirement?

• Please can we confirm the size of these datasets, so that we can ascertain the performance required to recall the data within these SLAs.

• Are DETSI planning on further formal tender procurement stages post RFI and presentations?

• Is there a timeline for the future procurement stages and delivery and transition to new platform?

• Is there a secured and indictive budget for the whole project?

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:46 PM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.2 for details in response to your question.

Question:
1. RFI documents state that the existing Accelerator nodes use the Nvidia V100 accelerators. Assuming that these are the PCIE cards. Is the preference from the DETSI team for Nvidia GPUs for the long term as well?

2. The ask from the DETSI team seems to be for PCIE GPU cards. Is there a preference on How many GPUs should be ideally supported per System?

3. The requirements calls for 200+ gbps networking. Is there a plan to introduce infiniband NDR and are NICs that suppport 400G today preferred?

4. The tender calls for 100 nodes but only 4800 cores. Modern day CPUs enable us to meet this core count requirement with a smaller number of nodes, without compromising performance. Is there a specific reason that Detsi are looking for this number of nodes?

5. The tender does not specific if single socket or dual socket solutions are preferred. Is there a preference?

6. WRF type of workloads are memory bound. Intel recently released MRDIMMS (8000/8800 MTS) which have a proven performance improvement for Memory bound workloads. will this be of interest to the DETSI team or are you interested in the standard 6400MTS memory? Similarly, is there a preference for AMD's Genoa-X servers with 3D v-Cache?

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:47 PM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.2 for details in response to your question.

Question:
HI

just wondering if you have been able to answer the questions below , this size of project takes time to put together a system to suit , however , without the answers below it will be very hard to tailor a system to suit

Answered on 08/May/2025 01:40 PM:


Good Afternoon

Thank you for the questions that have been submitted in relation to this RFI.

The project team are currently preparing responses to all questions that have been posed and anticipate a response will be released tomorrow.

Many thanks

Question:
HI , i note a response was sent , however none of our questions where answered

Answered on 12/May/2025 12:47 PM:


Clarifications v1.2 has now been released in response to all questions that have been raised.

Question:
Ww wanted to confirm that for this specific procurement that we can engage with the agency without needing prior accreditation or being part of a pre-approved panel. Thank you

Answered on 21/May/2025 08:33 AM:


Please refer to Clarifications v1.3 for details in response to your question.