The intent of this Request for Information (RFI) issued by the University of Waterloo, as a member of a purchasing consortium and in consultation with Compute Canada, Simon Fraser University and McGill University, is to solicit information from qualified companies for software, hardware, infrastructure or other experimental items.
Compute Canada has recently deployed several large resources across Canada. Most of the new systems are intended to be general purpose resources for researchers from across Canada. The general purpose systems, GPx, have been designed to support a very wide range of applications with diverse performance profiles. The GPx clusters run all planned workloads reasonably well but they are not optimized for any specific subset of applications or users. At any given time, the clusters will be executing a mixture of serial, MPI, OpenCL, CUDA, cloud, large memory, data intensive and interactive jobs.
This RFI is for experimental systems rather than more general purpose resources. For this RFI, “Experimental Systems” is being viewed as technology that can either now or in the near future be used to enhance the national platform in some way. This technology could be in the form of new software tools, data storage methods, special computational resources such as accelerators or new base platforms or even alternatives for data centre infrastructure or networking.
Compute Canada plans to deploy anywhere from three to a dozen or more experimental systems over the course of the next year. The number and size of each will be selected based on expected impact of each project and the overall total budget.
