Support for USGS climate model supercomputing

This is a Request For Information - This synopsis is for information and planning purposes only and is not to be construed as a commitment by the Government. No contract will be awarded as a result of this Sources Sought announcement. The United States Geological Survey, Office of Acquisition and Grants is soliciting information from qualified sources; the results of this announcement will be evaluated to determine if there are businesses capable of performing the proposed work.

The US Geological Survey, Office of Acquisition and Grants seeks responses from vendors that possess the capability to provide support for our climate model supercomputing environment.

The modeling and reconstructing past, present and future climate in North American project funded by the Land Change Science Research and Development Program (LCS R&D) is currently conducting climate simulations for the Department of Interior using global and regional numerical climate models. The project has been ongoing at Oregon State University for the past 25 years. The climate models are based on large code bases and require high speed, multithreaded CPUs, large memory capacity and very large volumes of disk storage. Model simulations typically take months to complete running 24 hours per day and they produce 10s of terabytes of model output that must be stored, transferred to local storage, and post-processed. CPU loads typically average >97% on an annual basis. Capacity, security in terms of fault tolerance, access speed and stability of long-term data bases are critical. Achieving the required level of connectivity, capacity and data safety requires the installation and maintenance of the Sun Solaris/ZFS file system for all data storage arrays. High levels of usage of the computers and storage are currently ongoing under a recently developed and fully implemented collaboration between the project and the Impacts of Climate Change on Communities, Landscapes, Ecosystems, and Organisms Project under the R&D component of Climate and Land Use Program. Maintaining intra- and internet connectivity, hardware, firmware, and software are critical to the mission of the project.

For further information, interested parties may contact the Contracting Officer, Charlan Fejarang at cjfejarang@usgs.gov by the due date COB March 17, 2021.