Attachment 2 - Detailed Specifications.pdf

Detailed Specifications for

Deployable Asymmetrical ISAC Testbed

(Performance Work Specification)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 Concept of Operation

2 Acronyms

3 System Overview

4 Mobile Enclosure & Power Management (M1)

5 Radio and RF Front-End Subsystem

6 Data Interconnects (X1)

7 Server Specifications

7.1 Server Roles

7.2 Common Server Requirements (C1 and C2 servers)

7.3 ISAC Sensor Server (C2) Additional Requirements

8 Government Acceptance Testing

9 Warranty and Support

1 CONCEPT OF OPERATION

NIST is developing a highly portable, asymmetrical dual-node computing and radio system designed for Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) experimentation. The core objective of this procurement is to establish a flexible testbed capable of dynamically emulating both a next-generation telecommunications network and a high-fidelity radar system simultaneously. To achieve this, the testbed will emulate 5G/6G communication nodes by transmitting and receiving physical layer (PHY) waveforms to support full uplink and downlink protocol exchanges. Concurrently, the system will utilize perfectly synchronized, phase-coherent software-defined radios to evaluate various radar topologies, specifically monostatic and bistatic sensing configurations, to illuminate and detect physical targets, such as drones, within a government-furnished anechoic chamber. Because real-time sensing is not required for this research, the architecture will rely on high-speed data shunting to massive non-volatile storage arrays for rigorous offline post-processing. This approach allows researchers to capture uninterrupted, high-bandwidth RF data and leverage dedicated hardware accelerators to extract precise environmental and target metrics after the physical experiments have been concluded.

2 ACRONYMS

The following are acronyms and abbreviations used within this document.

• AIO: All in one

• API: Application Programming Interface

• COTS: Commercial Off-The-Shelf

• CPU: Central Processing Unit

• CUDA: Compute Unified Device

Architecture

• DAC: Direct Attach Copper

• dB: Decibel

• DPDK: Data Plane Development Kit

• ECC: Error Correction Code

• EIA: Electronic Industries Alliance

• GbE: Gigabit Ethernet

• gNB: next-generation NodeB

• GPSDO: GPS-Disciplined Oscillator

• GPU: Graphics Processing Unit

• HDD: Hard Disk Drive

• ISAC: Integrated Sensing and

Communication

• LO: Local Oscillator

• MS/s: Mega-Samples per second

• NIC: Network Interface Card

• NIST: National Institute of Standards and Technology

• NUMA: Non-Uniform Memory Access

• NVMe: Non-Volatile Memory Express

• OEWG: Open-Ended Waveguide

• OS: Operating System

• PCIe: Peripheral Component

Interconnect Express

• PHY: Physical Layer

• PPS: Pulse-Per-Second

• QSFP28: Quad Small Form-factor

Pluggable 28

• RAID: Redundant Array of Independent

Disks

• RAM: Random Access Memory

• RDIMM: Registered Dual In-line Memory

Module

• RF: Radio Frequency

• SDR: Software-Defined Radio

• SMA: SubMiniature version A

• SSD: Solid-State Drive

• TLC: Triple-Level Cell

• TX: Transmit

• UE: User Equipment

• UHD: USRP Hardware Driver

• UPS: Uninterruptible Power Supply

• USRP: Universal Software Radio

Peripheral

3 SYSTEM OVERVIEW

The vendor shall provide a turnkey, highly portable, asymmetrical dual-node computing and radio system designed for ISAC experimentation. The architecture, shown in Figure 3.1, shall consist of one Transmit/Protocol Server (C1), one ISAC Sensor Server (C2), and two software-defined radios (R1). The system shall be synchronized via a central clock distribution hub (K1) and phase-coherent LO sharing (L2).

The system shall be housed in a mobile rack enclosure (M1) and shall be deployed adjacent to a Government-furnished anechoic chamber. The vendor shall provide all components, integration, and cabling, including the RF runs that penetrate the chamber bulkhead. The system shall rely on high-speed data shunting to non-volatile storage for offline post-processing via the integrated GPU (P1) thereby bypassing the CPU entirely. This is illustrated in the diagram of Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1. System Architecture

4 MOBILE ENCLOSURE & POWER MANAGEMENT (M1)

The system shall be fully self-contained within a portable rack enclosure, providing power conditioning, surge protection, and mobility.

• Rack Enclosure: The mobile enclosure shall be a 19-inch EIA standard server rack mounted on heavy-duty casters. The total height of the rack, including wheels, shall strictly not exceed 4 feet (48 inches). The rack shall feature robust horizontal and vertical cable runners. The USRP (R1) units shall be mounted in the rack such that the front panel of each unit is flush with the front of the modules of the rack. To align with the vertical location of the chamber bulkhead adapters, the USRPs shall be mounted towards the vertical middle of the rack, precisely 2 feet from the ground.

Mounting of the USRPs can be done with a shelf and hook and loop tape (Velcro) to keep the devices from shifting or falling.

• Acoustic and Thermal Management: To maintain a suitable working environment adjacent to the anechoic chamber, the fully integrated mobile rack (M1) shall be optimized for low-noise operation.

The vendor may achieve this through component-level thermal management (e.g., workstation-grade PWM cooling) or enclosure-level mitigation (e.g., sound-dampening rack panels and doors).

The total combined acoustic output of the fully populated operating rack, measured at a distance of 1 meter from the front enclosure door, shall strictly not exceed 50 dBA at idle and no more than 60 dBA under 100% sustained system load. The use of high-RPM, unregulated "screamer" server fans is strictly prohibited. For information, quiet server fans include the Noctua fans as an example for CPU and chassis cooling, and some server chassis styles such as the INFINITUM STUDIO 4U provide quiet options for server-style workstations.

• Electrical Requirements: The fully integrated rack shall be designed for operation on a standard North American 120V, 20A dedicated circuit utilizing a NEMA 5-20P plug. The mains power cable for the rack shall be a minimum of 20 feet in length. The vendor shall provide a power distribution unit (PDU) within the rack that matches this plug type and amperage rating. The PDU shall provide a sufficient number of outlets to power all integrated components and shall include a minimum of 20% expansion capacity in available outlets for future hardware additions.

• Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS): The system shall include a rack-mounted line-interactive or double-conversion UPS. The UPS shall be sized with a minimum capacity of 2200 VA / 1980 W to support the peak power of the fully integrated system and allow for future power expansion. The UPS shall provide a minimum of 5 minutes of battery runtime under full load. The UPS shall have the capability to be configured to automatically trigger a graceful shutdown on the servers if battery capacity falls below 30% to prevent NVMe corruption.

5 RADIO AND RF FRONT-END SUBSYSTEM

Because signal attenuation at Ku-band frequencies is a critical risk, all RF cabling shall be flexible, phase-stable, microwave-grade assemblies.

• Software Defined Radios (R1): The system shall include two (2) high-performance software-defined radios labeled as R1. The SDR shall be a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) product to ensure immediate availability and proven reliability. Each SDR shall be capable of streaming 500 MS/s per channel natively and shall have an instantaneous bandwidth of 1 GHz. The RF front-end shall feature a native frequency tuning range of 10 MHz to 20 GHz. The SDR hardware shall be natively driven by the open-source USRP Hardware Driver (UHD) API. (Example: NI / Ettus Research USRP X420).

• Clock Distribution Hub (K1): The system shall include one (1) central timing hub, labeled as K1, to ensure both SDRs are perfectly aligned. The hub shall feature an integrated GPS-disciplined oscillator (GPSDO) to provide an internal, highly stable timing reference without reliance on external signal generators. The hub shall output highly stable 10 MHz reference and 1 Pulse-Per- Second (1 PPS) timing signals. (Example: NI OctoClock-G CDA-2990).

• LO Sharing Interconnect (L2): The vendor shall provide one (1) flexible, phase-stable SMA to SMA cable, labeled as L2, rated up to 18.0 GHz. The L2 cable shall daisy-chain the local oscillators of the two SDRs to guarantee strict phase coherency. The L2 cable shall exhibit a maximum insertion loss of no more than 1.5 dB at 18.0 GHz.

• External RF Cabling (X2): The vendor shall provide four (4) flexible, ultra-low loss reciprocal RF cable assemblies labeled as X2. The length of each X2 cable shall be strictly 1 meter. The X2 cables shall utilize SMA (Male) to SMA (Male) connectors to successfully mate the SDR to the chamber's SMA (Female) bulkhead interfaces. The X2 cables shall exhibit a maximum insertion loss of no more than 1.5 dB at 18.0 GHz.

• Internal Chamber RF Cabling, Transmit (X4): The vendor shall provide two (2) flexible, ultra-low loss RF cable assembly labeled as X4. The length of the X4 cable shall be strictly 5 meters. The X4 cable shall utilize an SMA (Male) connector to the appropriate waveguide adapter for the TX antenna. The X4 cable shall exhibit a maximum insertion loss of no more than 7.5 dB at 18.0 GHz.

• Internal Chamber RF Cabling, Receive (X5): The vendor shall provide two (2) flexible, ultra-low loss RF cable assemblies labeled as X5. The length of each X5 cable shall be strictly 1 meter. The X5 cables shall utilize SMA (Male) connectors to the appropriate waveguide adapters for the RX antennas. The X5 cables shall exhibit a maximum insertion loss of no more than 1.5 dB at 18.0 GHz.

• ISAC Antennas (A1): The vendor shall provide open-ended waveguide (OEWG) antennas, labeled as A1, to support dual-band experimentation. The vendor shall supply one complete set of antennas for Ku-band (e.g., Antenx OEWG-WR62) and one complete set for X-band (e.g., Antenx OEWG-WR90). Each set shall include one (1) transmit antenna and three (3) receive antennas to match the 1 TX and 3 RX testbed topology. The antennas shall include compatible waveguide-to-coaxial adapters.

6 DATA INTERCONNECTS (X1)

• Network Cabling (X1): The vendor shall provide two (2) high-speed digital interconnects labeled as X1. The X1 interconnects shall be 100 GbE QSFP28 to QSFP28 Direct Attach Copper (DAC) cables. The X1 cables shall be sized efficiently for intra-rack routing between the SDRs and the Server NICs.

7 SERVER SPECIFICATIONS

7.1 Server Roles

The primary roles of the servers are described below. Both the C1 and C2 servers follow specifications in common with additional requirements for the C2 server. Each may serve as either transmitter/protocol or receiver/sensor depending on NIST research goals. Both servers shall be capable of performing the following roles:

1) Transmit/Protocol Role:

• Transmission of a PHY waveform at 6 GB/s to the USRP without data loss at the network interface

• Handles the network protocol stack between the server and an external wireless network device.

2) ISAC Sensor Role:

• Capture of two simultaneous data streams from the USRP at 6 GB/s combined (3 GB/s each stream)

• Shunts the data streams as packets directly to RAM bypassing the CPU

• Shunts payloads to the SSD from RAM – packet headers will already be stripped by the NIC (I1)

Only the ISAC Sensor server will have hardware acceleration computing capability using a high-performance GPU for post-processing of the data capture stored in the SSD or HDD.

7.2 Common Server Requirements (C1 and C2 servers)

• Compute Processing (CPU): The server CPU shall feature an enterprise workstation-class processor architecture tailored for high-bandwidth I/O. The processor must feature exactly 24 physical cores and 48 threads, and it must natively provide a minimum of 128 dedicated PCIe 5.0 lanes to prevent multiplexing bottlenecks (e.g., using the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9965WX architecture).

• Motherboard: The server shall utilize an enterprise workstation-class motherboard (e.g., WRX90 chipset or equivalent) designed explicitly to support the specified 128-lane CPU. The motherboard must provide a minimum of six (6) PCIe 5.0 x16 and 4 PCIe 5.0 x4 m.2 slots to support the ConnectX NIC, the GPU, the I2 NIC, and the NVMe RAID array simultaneously without lane multiplexing or bandwidth sharing.

• System Memory (RAM): The server system memory shall consist of a minimum of 128 GB DDR5 6000+ ECC RDIMM. The server operating system shall be configured to allocate 1 GB Hugepages for DPDK ring buffers.

• Network Interface Card (I1): The server shall include a dual-port 100 GbE QSFP28 Network Interface Card labeled as I1.

o The I1 NIC shall be an Ettus Research and National Instruments recommended hardware model, specifically the NVIDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-6 or -5 series. The I1 NIC shall fully support DPDK hardware offloading.

o The ConnectX-6 or -5 are necessary such that the packet headers may be stripped off prior to data being offloaded to the PCIe bus. This enables direct shunting of the data stream to the SSD, bypassing the CPU entirely, because the packet headers will not need to be removed.

• High-Speed Storage (SSD): The server shall include an enterprise-class NVMe SSD array configured in RAID 0. The SSD array shall provide a minimum usable capacity of 4 TB. The array shall utilize TLC or superior NAND and shall strictly not utilize consumer SLC-caching drives. The vendor shall execute an fio benchmark to prove the SSD array can sustain greater than 6.0 GB/s of sequential writes for 10 uninterrupted minutes. An example of a compliant SSD solution is the HighPoint SSD7540 RAID controller configured with four (4) enterprise U.2 NVMe SSDs.

• Archival Storage (HDD): The server shall include a high-capacity enterprise hard disk drive providing a minimum capacity of 16 TB for long-term archiving of captured datasets following post-processing.

• Additional Network Interface Card (I2): The server shall include a 4-port 1 Gbps Ethernet Network Interface Card, labeled as I2 (e.g., Intel I350-T4 or equivalent).

• Power supply: The power supply capacity shall be no less than 1200 Watts.

• Cooling: The CPU shall have AIO CPU liquid cooling system with a 360 mm radiator.

• OS & Drivers: The vendor shall install the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS operating system on the servers.

• Video Output Adapter (P2): The C1 server does not require a high-performance compute GPU. The vendor shall include a basic, low-profile discrete workstation graphics card (e.g., NVIDIA RTX5050 or equivalent) dedicated solely to providing local video output for system administration and OS rendering. The video adapter must provide HDMI and Display Port outputs.

7.3 ISAC Sensor Server (C2) Additional Requirements

• GPU Acceleration (P1): The ISAC Sensor server (C2) shall include a high-performance, professional-grade workstation graphics processing unit (GPU) for hardware acceleration, machine learning, and offline ISAC post-processing. To be considered compliant, the GPU must meet or exceed the following architectural specifications (with the NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell generation or superior as an example of a compliant GPU):

o Memory: Minimum of 48 GB of GDDR7 memory featuring Error Correction Code (ECC).

o Bus Interface: PCIe 5.0 x16.

o Processing Cores: Minimum of 14,080 parallel processing cores (e.g., CUDA), minimum of

440 Tensor Cores (5th generation architecture or equivalent), and a minimum of 110 Ray Tracing (RT) Cores.

o Memory Bandwidth: Minimum sustained bandwidth of 1,344 GB/s.

o Power and Thermal: Maximum thermal design power (TDP) shall not exceed 300 Watts.

The card shall utilize an active, blower-style fan within a dual-slot, full-height/full-length (FHFL) form factor to ensure proper server-rack exhaust routing.

8 GOVERNMENT ACCEPTANCE TESTING

All acceptance testing will be executed independently by Government personnel at the Government facility.

Vendor on-site presence is strictly not required for this phase. Accordingly, the vendor shall not include any travel, lodging, per diem, or on-site engineering labor costs associated with acceptance testing in their proposal. The Government will perform the following tests to verify compliance with the specifications prior to authorizing final payment:

• System Initialization: Verification of successful power on, BIOS POST, and operating system boot for both the Transmit (C1) and Sensor (C2) servers without thermal or hardware errors.

• Network and Timing Connectivity: Verification of network connectivity and 100 GbE link states between the ConnectX NICs and the USRP X420 radios.

• Storage Throughput Benchmark: Government execution of fio testing per specifications on the RAID 0 NVMe arrays of both servers to demonstrate a sustained sequential write speed of greater than 6.0 GB/s for 10 uninterrupted minutes.

• Receive (RX) Data Shunting: Verification on both servers of the successful capture of 6 GB/s (two simultaneous 500 MS/s) signal streams from the USRP RF RX front-end directly to the SSD storage without dropped packets or buffer overflows.

• Transmit (TX) Data Shunting: Verification on both servers of the successful transmission of 6 GB/s (two simultaneous 500 MS/s) signal streams from the SSD storage to the USRP RF TX output without underflows.

9 WARRANTY AND SUPPORT

• System Warranty: The vendor shall provide a minimum one-year (1-year) comprehensive warranty on the fully integrated testbed system. This warranty shall cover all integration, assembly, cabling, and workmanship, commencing from the date of successful Government acceptance.

• Component Pass-Through Warranty: The vendor shall formally pass through all original equipment manufacturer (OEM) warranties for individual COTS components (e.g., servers, CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, USRP radios) directly to the Government. Where specific OEM warranties exceed the one-year system warranty (such as standard 3-year or 5-year enterprise warranties on the AMD Threadripper PRO CPUs, NVMe SSDs, and NVIDIA GPUs), that extended coverage shall transfer to and remain in full effect for the Government.

• RMA and Replacement: During the warranty period, the vendor or OEM shall repair or replace any defective hardware component at no additional cost to the Government. Warranty service shall be executed via a standard Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) "depot" or "return-to-manufacturer" process. To minimize contract costs, on-site vendor repair labor is explicitly not required.