PPI4HPC shortlisted for the Procura+ Outstanding Innovation Procurement in ICT Award
The PPI4HPC project and their work to bring computing services to the next level for excellent research is one of the four shortlisted candidates under the category Outstanding Innovation Procurement in ICT of the Procura+ Awards, an initiative supported by the Procure2Innovate project.
PPI4HPC is a joint procurement project in which five research bodies aimed to buy innovative high-performance supercomputer and an innovative high-performance storage system for science and engineering applications. The goal was to achieve a significant upgrade of the European high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure towards future exascale systems.
The joint procurement led by GENCI, the French public company in charge of providing high-performance computing and processing data, was organised in four independent lots leading to the awarding of contracts for systems that have meanwhile or are being deployed at four different research sites throughout Europe. Drawing from several previous pre-commercial procurement (PCP) developments, this procurement resulted in an ongoing improvement of computing and therefore research capacity. By doing a joint procurement, the consortium was able to pose high demands on an evolving market and reap the outcomes of prior PCP processes.