Scotland's University of St Andrews has closed an agreement for a new supercomputer.

OCF Limited has been awarded the contract for the supply and installation of a new high performance computing (HPC) system at the university valued at £1.99m ($2.55m).

The university received nine tenders for the contract.

According to the tender, first reported by DCD, the solution should provide "at least 15,000 x64 compatible compute cores at 2GB RAM per core, excluding log-in nodes and peripheral devices," in addition to high memory nodes with "at least one 4TB RAM and two 2TB RAM."

Furthermore, the number of GPU nodes included should have a combined cost of 20 percent of the other requirements.

The HPC system must also be able to scale for each use case, including fast throughput parallel processing, single-node high core-count and high memory processing, and GPU workloads.

The contract award notice was published on May 21. No clear timeline for the project has been shared.

OCF Limited is a Sheffield-based company, self-described as "high-performance computing, storage, cloud, and AI experts." The company has previously provided the HPC systems for the N8 Research Group and the University of Aberdeen, among others.

The University of St Andrews has an existing HPC cluster called Kennedy, which has 110 compute nodes in total, each containing 32 cores (two 2.1GHz 16-core Intel Broadwell Xeon E5-2683 processors), 128GB memory, 87GB local scratch disk. Two of the nodes are GPU nodes.

The university also has a bioinformatics HPC called Marvin, which has a frontend (head) server and 10 worker nodes fully dedicated to NGS analysis. These are complemented by additional storage (56TB), giving a total of 192 CPU cores and 2.5TB RAM.