99 -- Workload Management Software System

Modification: To request a copy of the below referenced Figures, send e-mail request to [email protected] by April 21, 2006. End of Modification********. This notice is issued pursuant to FAR 15.202, Advisory multi-step process. This notice contains a description of a new requirement and instructions on how companies should respond. This notice is not the actual solicitation, but is for the purpose of determining which companies are interested and to evaluate their solution viability prior to soliciting proposals. GSA will notify companies responding to this notice if they are invited to participate in the resultant acquisition, or that it is unlikely to be a viable competitor. If a company is determined not to be a viable competitor, they are not precluded from submitting a proposal once the actual solicitation is issued. The solicitation for this requirement is expected for release within the next 30 days. This notice does not constitute a commitment on the part of the Government, and does not guarantee that an actual solicitation or a contract will be issued. 1.0 Overview 1.1 The Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) is seeking information for a workload management software suite; a.k.a. job queuing and scheduling system. The resulting contract will consist of a four-year base period and six one-year option periods. The workload management software (WMS) suite will be deployed across the entire suite of heterogeneous HPC hardware resources located at the HPCMP Major Shared Resource Centers (MSRCs) and Allocated Distributed Centers (ADCs). See www.hpcmo.hpc.mil for an HPCMP overview. 1.2 The HPC systems are operated as shared resources to serve the DoD Science and Technology and Test and Evaluation communities. Workload management consists of a layered software capability that is tightly integrated with the HPC system’s operating system and/or native resource manager. The WMS accepts all users requests for computational resources (processors, memory, software) and schedules those requests against the available resources on the system to help ensure an overall most efficient use of the total system (s’) resources while meeting the operating policies specified by the organization. HPCMP HPC resources are currently operated primarily in a batch mode but there are increasing instances of requirements for alternate and more complex workload management capabilities. 1.3 The resulting contract from this acquisition will provide a commercial software capability to address all WM requirements on all HPCMP allocated systems and test systems supporting allocated systems. An allocated system is a DoD HPCMP HPC system for which all or some substantial sub-set of the CPU hours available on that system are allocated to DoD projects with multiple users operating under each project. Each project is annually allocated a specific number of CPU hours and as that project uses those CPU hours, the project’s allocation is decremented. Test systems are small systems of like architecture to larger production systems that the Centers or the HPCMP office use to test new software configurations or capabilities. It is anticipated that the selected WMS will first be deployed on HPCMP systems planned for delivery in the June 2007 timeframe. The actual solicitation will request a transition plan for existing systems. 1.4 The product of this acquisition is “linked” to another acquisition of HPC systems that the HPCMP conducts annually known as Technology Integration XX (TI-XX) where XX is the fiscal year of system deployment. The TI-XX acquisition requires HPC OEMs to delivery large HPC systems to HPCMP Centers such as the MSRCs and ADCs. Included in the TI-XX acquisition are requirements for acceptance testing and follow-on HW and SW maintenance. The Government intends to include in all TI-XX acquisitions from this point forward a requirement for the TI-XX winning offeror to accept the selected HPCMP WMS as Government Furnished Equipment (GFE), integrate the WMS into their offering and include it in their acceptance testing and HW/SW maintenance terms and conditions; i.e. if the HPC system fails to perform and it is the fault of the WMS, it is the TI-XX vendor’s responsibility to resolve the issue. Note that the Government’s WMS software maintenance contract is available to them as GFE to assist in the resolution of the problem. Accordingly, all TI-07 (and beyond) acquisitions will include the above-described requirement. 1.5 TI-XX contract awards are typically made to one to three vendors for two to four systems each year. Awards are typically made in late December or early January with system deliveries in the May-June timeframe and full acceptance by September. Should TI offerors choose not to share their offerings with the WMS contractor earlier due to acquisition sensitive issues, the WMS contractor would be required to port and test their product to the selected systems between mid-January to May. This is an important requirement to be sensitive to as the lack of a WMS (supplied as GFE to the TI vendor) would be an excellent opportunity for the TI vendor to leverage the non-functional GFE as the reason for a delayed delivery; avoiding late delivery penalties. In such cases, the Government reserves the right to hold the WMS vendor responsible. 1.6 Because this software is so integrated into the TI machines and is instrumental in determining success of the TI systems as described above in paragraphs 1.4 and 1.5, the Government has determined that it is in its best interest to limit this acquisition to companies who are original software developers of a commercial product (sometimes referred to as OEMs – except it is software instead of equipment). Three factors contribute to this decision: a. The porting and testing of the software product to the various TI acquired systems will require the intense involvement of the original software developers and their relationships with the TI vendors. Adding a reseller function into this requirement increases the complexity of the relationships introducing added indirect and/or direct costs, increased risk and little or no added value; i.e. it’s most efficient for the TI vendor to work directly with the WMS OEM. b. The pursuit of a commercial product is desirable as investments made by the OEM over the 10-year contract duration to address other commercial requirements can be leveraged to address DoD requirements and visa versa; allowing the DoD to leverage the commercial product development activities toward lower product and maintenance costs. c. The requirement for the TI vendors to participate in the installation of the product coupled with the ability to leverage existing technical services contracts already in place at the Centers for sustainment alleviates the need for additional professional services; the area where a reseller would typically add value. 1.7 Historical TI investments have ranged from $30-40M annually. Additional intermittent investments can occur at the ADCs. Some have been as significant as $30M in a given year. Commensurate with the annual investment, the HCPMP typically decommissions systems that are 48 months or older. There is also sometimes a short overlap of a few months when new installations are in place and those systems planned for decommission have not yet been removed; requiring a short burst for additional WMS capability. Figure 1 and 2 show the HABU (one HABU equivalent represents the equivalent performance of the weighted DoD benchmark suite on a 1024 CPU IBM power 3 system) and GF counts acquired via the historical investments and decommissioning of systems. These growth curves coupled with the Offeror’s projections of potential growth from continued like investments may serve as a valuable resource for assessing the WMS requirement. 2.0 Technical Requirements: 2.1 The WMS should support the basic job queuing, job scheduling and accounting capabilities associated with a traditional WMS operating in a multi-user environment. The DoD also desires functionality such as advanced reservation, dynamic load balancing, job migration, allow job interdependencies including job-changing, dynamic reconfiguration, manage multiple tasks and threads, among other features. In addition, WM across multiple systems (cross-system and/or cross-Center queuing and scheduling) located in multiple geographically distributed locations with integrated security, accounting and data management is desired. 2.2 The overall technical functionality of the company’s software will be evaluated as a part of this pre-solicitation notice. In response to this pre-solicitation notice, it is requested that the potential Offeror submit a Not To Exceed 4 page description of their product’s technical capabilities. 2.3 Specific technical functionality will be specified in the actual solicitation along with a request for a more extensive description of how the Offeror’s product addresses each requirement. In addition, the actual solicitation will require demonstration testing. 3.0 Support Requirements: 3.1 Currently the HPCMP’s allocated hardware resource suite consists of approximately 25 individual HPC systems (7 with more than 2000 processors/cores) with 8 different operating systems and 8 different interconnect technologies from 5 different HPC manufacturers. See www.asc.hpc.mil/consolidated/hardware.php for a list of most of the currently deployed systems. Deploying a common WMS across this diverse environment as well as addressing the continuously changing landscape of HPC technology that will be deployed over the next 10 years will require a significant capability and commitment from the Offeror to rapidly respond to this extensive and ever-changing set of requirements. 3.2 In response to this pre-solicitation notice, please provide a company profile, the company’s business focus, existing products, level of resources (specifically dedicated to software development and testing for the WMS commercial software product) available to be responsive to this requirement, the history of the WMS product and the relationships, agreements or arrangements the company has with existing HPC OEMs for porting and supporting the WMS product on their systems. In addition, please outline any unique or customized management and/or technical infrastructures that would be put in place to address the DoD HPCMP requirement. The Support Requirements response should not exceed 2 Pages. 3.3 The actual solicitation will request similar information and include an extensive evaluation of the Offeror’s ability to develop, port, test, deploy and sustain a commercial software product that can meet the DoD HPCMP’s requirement. 4.0 Past Performance 4.1 Given the critical role the WMS serves in the HPCMP’s 24x7 production environment and the long-term nature of this contract, it is important for the Government to reduce risk by carefully assessing the offeror’s historical track record with regard to supporting an environment like the HPCMP’s. In response to this pre-solicitation notice, please include references to existing installations of the company’s product with information such as organization or company name, system size, operating system, communication protocols used; i.e. MPI, Open MP, SHMEM, MLP,…, the interconnect/switch technology (or product name), and the nature of the workload; i.e. many single processor jobs, a few large processor jobs dominating the system, average job size of a quarter the system size backfilled with smaller jobs,…. The Past Performance response should not exceed 2 Pages. 4.2. The actual solicitation will request specific POC information for various installations and permission for the Government to contact these individuals. 5.0 Price 5.1 The HPCMP considers this contract to be a long term, mutually beneficial relationship with the WMS provider. The following are important factors that the DoD HPCMP can contribute to the partnership: a. The surfacing technical and operational requirements that will provide a company with opportunities to enhance the commercial product to make it more competitive in the overall commercial marketplace. b. The highlighting of significant accomplishments of implementations on large scale systems and/or a broad-scale HPCMP-wide deployments, for example, the deployment of cross-queuing and scheduling capabilities across DoD systems and Centers. b. Provide exposure of offerors’ product and its capabilities to many DoD users including government, contractor and university scientists and engineers performing computational investigations. These users may in turn choose to separately (separate from this contract) acquire and deploy offerors’ product for systems operated under their administration. c. Provide opportunities for ports of offerors’ software product to new HPC systems with a high degree of collaboration (via contractual requirements) with HPC OEMs. This positions the offerors’ product for early commercial availability to other customers. In turn, the HCPMP requires that the licensing model for the product and associated maintenance services be priced in the context of this long-term partnership. In addition, it is of value for the HPCMP to have annual cost predictability independent of the outcome of the TI-deployments. It is requested that the company provide an annual firm fixed price for sufficient commercial software products and maintenance services to meet the requirements for the 10-year life of the contract. For purposes of this notice, request the company submit commercial product pricing, and any information regarding special pricing arrangements for potential offering to the HPCMP. Do not submit a detailed pricing proposal. The Pricing response should not exceed 2 pages. 6.0 Evaluation Criteria for Elements of this Notice: 6.1 Technical Requirements section: For this section, the Government will evaluate the respondents overall technical functionality of proposed product. This may include elements such as advanced reservation, dynamic load balancing, job migration, allow job interdependencies including job-changing, dynamic reconfiguration, manage multiple tasks and threads, among other features. 6.2 Support Requirements section: For this section, the Government will evaluate the respondents company profile, the company’s business focus, existing products, level of resources (specifically dedicated to software development and testing for the WMS commercial software product) available to be responsive to this requirement, the history of the WMS product and the relationships, agreements or arrangements the company has with existing HPC OEMs for porting and supporting the WMS product on their systems. 6.3 Past Performance: For this section, the Government will evaluate the respondents references to existing installations of the company’s product with information such as organization or company name, system size, operating system, communication protocols used; i.e. MPI, Open MP, SHMEM, MLP,…, the interconnect/switch technology (or product name), and the nature of the workload; i.e. many single processor jobs, a few large processor jobs dominating the system, average job size of a quarter the system size backfilled with smaller jobs,…. 6.4 Price: For this section, the Government will evaluate the respondents pricing model(s) and associated maintenance services in the context of a long-term contractual relationship. Response to this notice should not exceed 10 pages total. Responses to this pre-solicitation notice are due to Ms. Mona P. Neal, GSA Contracting Officer, by 4:00 p.m. CST, April 26, 2006. Send electronic responses to [email protected]. Do not send hard copies unless requested by GSA.