SPECIAL NOTICE
D -- RFI - HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING SERVICE
- Notice Date
- 7/25/2013
- Notice Type
- Special Notice
- NAICS
- 541519
— Other Computer Related Services
- Contracting Office
- Department of Commerce, U. S. Census Bureau, Suitland, Acquisition Division, Room 3J438, Washington, District of Columbia, 20233
- ZIP Code
- 20233
- Solicitation Number
- HPCRFI2013
- Archive Date
- 9/14/2013
- Point of Contact
- pamela a miller, Phone: 301/763-3547
- E-Mail Address
-
pamela.a.miller@census.gov
(pamela.a.miller@census.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- The following Request for Information (RFI) is issued solely for Market Research purposes. This document does not constitute a Request for Proposal (RFP) or a commitment to issue an RFP by the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau is not accepting offers at this time nor will the information provided be evaluated or considered as an offer. The Census Bureau is not responsible for any cost incurred by a contractor in responding to this announcement. The following questions are intended to help the Census Bureau/ Although answers to the following questions are optional, the Census Bureau encourages companies to submit responses based on their knowledge and experience with this service in the commercial marketplace. Based on the information provided, and as part of its ongoing market research, the Census Bureau may contact individual respondents for additional information. All information provided will be kept confidential and will be utilized for market research purposes directly related to the work described above. INSTRUCTIONS: Responses to this RFI should be sent as an attachment to pamela.a.miller@census.gov, in Word or PDF format document, not to exceed ten (10) pages (8.5" x 11", 12-pitch font size). The following information should also be included in your responses document: 1. Company name, address, and Web site. 2. Contact person's name, position, email and phone number. 3. Brief description of the organization, including business size (e.g. large business, small business (including type) and services provided. If company has a current GSA contract, please provide the contract number. You may include marketing literature or brochures (pdf format) with your response. Please title emails U.S. Census Bureau - Request for Information: Selected High Performance Computing Service Providers Overview: Purpose The purpose of this Request for Information (RFI) is to evaluate if High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities and services are available to support and maintain the U.S. Census Bureau (USCB) data research needs for both internal Census researchers and external academic researchers that conduct research using non-Public use Census Data sets. Security requirements for these non-Public use (contain PII data) datasets are extremely rigid. In addition, due to the sensitive nature of the data, access must be restricted to researchers that have gone through a rigorous vetting process and have ultimately been approved to have access to the data. Researchers that meet these requirements must become "Sworn Census Employees" before they are granted access to the data. Anyone supporting the systems or storage from a technical standpoint must also go through a rigorous security review and become a "Special Sworn Employee". User permissions to access individual data sets must be strictly restricted and must be tracked and auditable. Background The USCB's mission is to serve as the leading source of quality data about the nation's people and economy. The USCB operates under Title 13 of the U.S. Code and complies with other Federal agency' security requirements (IRS Title 26 and SSA Title 42) under legal agreements with the goal of providing the best mix of timeliness, relevancy, quality, and cost for the data collected and services provided. USCB's data is: • Mandated by the U.S. Constitution, • Used to determine the distribution of Congressional seats to states, • Used to apportion seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and • Used to define legislature districts, school district assignment areas and other important functional areas of government. • Used to to make decisions about what community services to provide. The Research and Methodology (R&M) Directorate within the USCB facilitates the review, approval and access to data by researchers that conduct relevant research using Census Administrative data from the Decennial and Economic Census' as well as Demographic programs. Currently there are approximately 600 researchers working within the Census Bureau and external Research Data Centers combined. A computing environment within the USCB currently supports these researchers. This compute environment needs to be refreshed to meet the future needs of the researchers and the agency. Before the USCB commits to redesigning and refreshing this compute environment, we would like to determine if the compute resources and services are available externally to support our needs. The Research and Methodology Directorate needs a cohesive infrastructure that is designed in a proactive manner to support its future vision. The number of remote access locations (known as Research Data Centers) and researchers is expected to nearly double during the upcoming five-year period. This growth in the number of locations, people, and projects that need to be supported underscores the need for a High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure that supports collaboration with internal and external entities, and for scalable provisioning to allocate resources that meet the demand. The researchers also need to have: access to a wide range of statistical software packages; the ability to modify, run and store scripts and data output files; and the ability to retrieve scripts, output files and other project related information up to 2 - 5 years after the work was completed. In order to assess the capability of outside entities to provide these services, we have compiled a set of questions that the USCB would like answered. The USCB would also like to receive some estimated cost estimates for providing services. The existing Research Compute environment includes several components including: • An internal Management and Approval System (for internal and external projects) • An external Management System (for external researchers) • An identity Management component (that manages access, rights, file permissions) • Server infrastructure connected to approximately 200 TB of data. A key assumption to this request is that the Management and Approval systems for researchers would remain at the USCB and thus, the providers of an external HPC environment would need to be able to interface with our systems via a secure encrypted Virtual Private Network that is controlled by two-factor authentication. A document and diagram showing our proposed architecture is included with this RFI for background. Interconnect with Census 1. Is there a "Secure" capability in accordance with IAW FIPS 200 and NIST 800-53 for researchers to remotely connect to the compute environment via two factor authentication in order to monitor and manage processing jobs for a specific research project? 2. Is there a "Secure" capability IAW FIPS 200 and NIST 800-53 for the results of research processing jobs to be accessible via two factor authentication by more than one researcher? 3. Is there a "Secure" capability IAW FIPS 200 and NIST 800-53 for an research administrator to review research work being done via two factor authentication? 4. Census maintains applications that support management of research projects (define permissions, users, projects at any point in time). Data between these systems and the HPC provider would need to be exchanged on a real time basis. What would be your recommended way to accomplish this while adhering to all required security policies? 5. Please explain the capabilities of your overall computing resources (total number of CPUs/cores/memory, largest number of CPUs/cores/memory within a single node/OS instance, shared file systems, scratch file systems, interconnect speed/latency between nodes) that would be available to the USCB researchers. 6. Can individual jobs be restricted in their resource utilization, based on user/group/project membership? 7. Are there any limits to the total amount of data that can be stored at a single time? Limits of backup capability, difference by speed of storage. 8. What processing job management/scheduling tool(s) (e.g., PBSPro, MRG, etc.) are available? 9. Does the HPC environment support: ◦ SAS? If so, what versions? ◦ R? If so, what versions? ◦ Matlab? If so, what versions? ◦ Gauss? If so, what versions? ◦ Stata? If so, what versions? ◦ Python? If so, what versions? ◦ GPU computing (Matlab/Custom)? If so, what versions? ◦ databases (Oracle, MySQL, PostGreSQL, etc.)? If so, what versions? ◦ in-memory database? ◦ Various compilers? Fortran/C others. 10. Does your service provide support for software applications? If so, which applications do you support? What type of support does your organization provide? How is support accessed? 11. Can researchers provide their own applications to install on nodes? Is there a review process to determine if certain products can be installed? If so, what is the process? How long does it generally to review and approve? 12. In addition to Census rules of behavior (see attached), what rules of behavior need to be followed by users of the system? 13. How do customers of secure data re-locate source data to your external hosting site? Please Take USCB data volume into account when responding to this question. 14. Do you have a method or capability of processing data that is stored at an alternate location (i.e., Census)? If so - please provide information on this capability that explains the interfaces needed between sites. 15. What strategy would you recommend to remove data off the hosting site and securely erase the data when/if the hosting contract is terminated. How do we pull 100TB-300TB off the site? Communication: 1. Do you have system alerts implemented that would alert us if we are reaching a maximum cost threshold ? Do you have accounting process alerts implemented that would alert us that we may be reaching a cost threshold? 2. How do you communicate planned system downtime to users? How much lead time do you provide? 3. What types of alerts do you have implemented that would communicate to users if the system(s) are unavailable or experiencing difficulties? 4. How do you communicate to users the status of system issues when/if systems have difficulties? 5. What is your standard way of communicating with customers for management issues, questions and customers communicating with you? Security: Clearly the security of Census datasets and the access to the data sets is of utmost importance to the USCB. The public trust is very important to the agency as well as to the public. The Federal Government and USCB have very strict access and security requirements. These security requirements are outlined in Census Bureau IT Security Program Policy, the DOC IT Security Program Policy and NIST SP 800-53r4I. The following questions assume that each provider responding has read these requirements and is answering the questions with the understanding of what security requirements must be met in order to host this USCB initiative. 1. Please explain how data is secured in your environment and what day to day protections are in place to ensure this security. 2. Users of Census data sets are not allowed to visually or technically comingle data between two or more datasets. How could this requirement be met in your environment? 3. How are logical access protections implemented in your environment? 4. What security controls are implemented (i.e., physical and electronic)? 5. Have you obtained a FISMA Authority To Operate (ATO) for a segmented HPC environment at least at the Moderate Level for Federal Systems or a FedRAMP Provisional ATO? Can you also meet the security standards in IRS Pub 1075? 6. Have you ever stored/managed IRS data? If you have, please provide information on how long you have done this, security level of the data and for which agencies. 7. How much experience do you have managing all types of "sensitive" data in accordance with the various rules established by its owners and users (e.g., title 26 data)? 8. Due to the sensitivity of the data in the Census data sets, data cannot be commingled with other customers' data when backups are done. Data backups must also be stored in the secured environments away from other customers' backups. Can this requirement be met in your environment? How? 9. Do you have the capability to restore individual files from backups on-demand? What is the process to restore systems/ individual files.? How long does it take to restore individual files? 10. Due to the sensitivity of the data in the Census data sets any SAN or local disk that had ever contained Census data must be destroyed at the end of the contract or when disk is being replaced due to technical issues or refreshed. A manager from the contractor would have to attest to this in writing to Census or we would have to send someone out to verify. Could this requirement be met in your environment? How? What costs would be incurred by the BOC in order to meet this requirement? 11. What security tools do you have that audit and alert on potential or actual security incidents within the HPC? 12. How would you report this to the Census Bureau Incident Response Team within the appropriate time frame as stipulated in the Census Bureau IT Security Program Plan? 13. Do you have firewalls, IDS/IPS and anti-virus software installed and active in your HPC environment? Costs: (for the following questions please provide as much information as possible so that USCB can assess the cost of implementing the service). COST 1. What is the pricing structure for the HPC service (e.g., by user, processing time, resource loading, etc.)? Please provide your most current information. Also provide any discounts/added costs provided based on volume. 2. What is the pricing structure for storage? (please take into account USCB requirements (approximately 100TB - 300TB of data and that data cannot be commingled and that storage devices must be destroyed after use). 3. What is the pricing structure for backup and restore services? What is included in these costs? 4. What is the pricing structure for application support? What is included in these costs?
- Web Link
-
FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/spg/DOC/CB/13040001/HPCRFI2013/listing.html)
- Place of Performance
- Address: 4600 SILVER HILL ROAD, WASHINGTON, District of Columbia, 20233, United States
- Zip Code: 20233
- Zip Code: 20233
- Record
- SN03127900-W 20130727/130726000218-31f0bd0322caf24c64945b9c7cd42aca (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
(may not be valid after Archive Date)
| FSG Index | This Issue's Index | Today's FBO Daily Index Page |