Atos will be paid $29m over $1b UK Met Office supercomputer dispute
- Reference: 1673270470
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/01/09/uk_gov_atos_settlement/
- Source link:
The the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Met Office entered into a settlement agreement with the French IT supplier and agreed to a joint payment of £24 million "without admission of liability," according to the department's [1]annual report [PDF].
The central government department agreed to contribute £20.7 million ($25.13 million) to this settlement with the balance of £3.3 million ($4 million) being paid by the Met Office.
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In June last year, [3]The Register exclusively revealed the parties had settled out of court after Atos filed a legal challenge against the contract award to Microsoft, announced in February 2021. The supplier claimed BEIS and the Met Office had breached the government's obligations under the Public Contract Regulations 2015, which led to its unfair dismissal for being "non-compliant" with the technical requirements specified in the tender.
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Court [6]documents showed [PDF] Atos challenged the decision over requirements for the supply of two test supercomputers and a development supercomputer in addition to the main supercomputer system, where the test and development systems were to be "architecturally equivalent" to the main supercomputer.
BEIS and the Met Office said Atos's bid was non-compliant with the stated requirements and gave it a score of 0/5 in each of three categories on the basis that the proposed development supercomputer system was "not architecturally equivalent to the main supercomputer system." It was claimed to have used different processors.
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Atos, for its part, claimed the government had made "manifest errors" in the evaluation of its tender. It also said the two bodies made the decision based on "undisclosed requirements" or that BEIS and the Met Office had "interpreted the requirement of architectural equivalence in a way which would not be transparent" to Atos. It was also alleged the government was "disproportionate" in ruling its bid non-compliant without seeking further clarification on the architectural equivalence of the Atos system.
[8]Atos, UK government reach settlement on $1 billion Met Office supercomputer dispute
[9]Atos opens 'exploratory talks' with possible investors in breakaway Evidian biz
[10]Europe to have 2 of the 4 most powerful supercomputers as Leonardo comes online
[11]SiPearl works with AMD on GPU support for Arm HPC chip
The government denied liability, stating that the requirement of architectural equivalence was interpreted correctly, and the Atos tender was scored correctly because the proposed development supercomputer lacked the required architectural equivalence.
At the time, a BEIS spokesperson said the proceedings regarding supercomputer procurement have been resolved "with no admission of liability from any party."
"The agreement allows the Met Office to concentrate efforts on delivering the infrastructure necessary to keep the UK at the forefront of global weather and climate science leadership," they said.
Atos said: "We are pleased to have resolved this matter."
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Speaking to [13]the Financial Times , Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the opposition Labour party, said the settlement was "yet another example of the [ruling] Conservatives failing to take care of public money. While families are counting every penny, the Tories are shelling out taxpayers' cash to pay for their own mistakes."
The government told the publication an "independent review" had found all procurement processes were followed and there were no failures associated with governance or lack of controls.
"The proceedings regarding supercomputer procurement have been resolved with no admission of liability from any party. This settlement is in the best interest of taxpayers," it said. ®
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[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1112532/beis-annual-report-and-accounts-2021-2022.pdf
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/hpc&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y7xIL5oZdBHvCy1utPtaSwAAAE0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/14/atos_supercomputer_dispute_settled/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/hpc&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y7xIL5oZdBHvCy1utPtaSwAAAE0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/hpc&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y7xIL5oZdBHvCy1utPtaSwAAAE0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/TCC/2022/42.pdf
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/hpc&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y7xIL5oZdBHvCy1utPtaSwAAAE0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/14/atos_supercomputer_dispute_settled/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/03/atos_opens_exploratory_talks_with_future_minority_shareholders_in_evidian/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/22/leonardo_supercomputer_goes_live/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/15/sipearl_amd_arm_hpc_chip/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/hpc&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y7xIL5oZdBHvCy1utPtaSwAAAE0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.ft.com/content/c5acd2b1-3ce2-4b06-a298-b704070fad3a
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: This is Public Sector Procurement
Can confirm and probably from an entirely different sector and part of the country than you.
Irony is we have specialists, teams of them involved in procurements which can take years to complete, requirements, bidding etc all run very professionally but there is ultimately nobody "in charge" who would ever be held accountable should it not be successful and by the time it is unsuccessful - they've left, retired etc.
Re: This is Public Sector Procurement
When working for the NHS, we put a tender out for a new system. One of the requirements was context awareness as part of interoperability - it needed to talk to other systems and retain context when moving between systems.
One vender offered their solution which failed entirely to meet core criteria including interoperability - it was a silo system with no data connectors available. For whatever reason. Their offering was rejected. They kicked off a fuss and sure enough, threatened legal action if we did not include their non-compliant offering in the second round of testing. So... they were included, and they failed to make the grade. So they threatened legal action once more.
They got told to jog off. Their system met 20% of the requirements, and failed to meet the key elements entirely, but we'd let the clinicians take a look and they had flatly rejected it.
Some companies believe in vexatious litigation to bully companies into paying them money. Seems the Government still hasn't learned this (or to play fair in how they award contracts)
Buy a supercomputer from Microsoft?
Didn't know MS had any experience in high-performance computing. Suspect someone has been misled into believing cloud (and thus Azure) is equivalent to a supercomputer...
More questions than answers.
The linked pdf makes for some interesting reading. It's mostly around questions for expert witnesses, and one of the core claims was around 'architectural equivalence'. Some of that seemed to revolve around CPUs. So the production system using Intel's Saphire Rapids, aka Gen4 Xeon and dev/test systems using Ice Lake Gen3 Xeons. I'm no supercomputer expert*, but there seems to be a lot of differences in the microarchitectures between platforms.
Strangely, the doc seemed to rule out some questions on architectural equivalence saying those would rely on opinions from expert witnesses. I'm not a lawyer either, so don't understand the subtle distinction between experts offering opinions vs statemenst of fact. Having done a bunch of government bids in the past though, I probably would have questioned the bid question to get clarification. If I'd been evaluating the bid though, I probably would have scored it low based on the difference in architectures. I guess the devil would be in the detail around how exactly Atos answered that question. But to me, it seems a bit like saying production would be on Gen4 Xeons, the rest on some old 486DX50s, and that's fine because they're both x86 compatible. Shame it didn't go to trial because it would have been interesting to see the filings, assuming they were published.
*But my newest funbox does run Crysis..
Re: More questions than answers.
"The linked pdf makes for some interesting reading. It's mostly around questions for expert witnesses, and one of the core claims was around 'architectural equivalence'."
Someone putting "architectural equivalence" in the requirements is screaming out loud to the tenders: "we can choose or dismiss you based on any hidden politics and nothing factual".
That's probably why they had to give money to Atos.
Whenever I have that kind of requirements in an RFP, I'm thinking of running away ...
Forecasting
So gone are the days when a barometer, a look out of the window and a wet finger, were all that was needed to decide whether to take a macintosh (raincoat)
This is Public Sector Procurement
Having been involved in procurement as part of the public sector everything is a merry-go-round of arse covering.
Raynor ranting that the Government is not looking after public money is a minor piece of detail.
Everything in creating tenders is about contracts and legal teams protecting the organisation against unsuccessful responses suing them. Whether the successful bid actually delivers what is required is of lower priority.
What is equally poor is these companies believe that it is acceptable to sue because they were not accepted. There are two sides to the problem and in my view it is the attitude that these providers of services and solutions believe that they can sue just because it is public sector.
Given the absolutely abysmal services and solutions they do provide yet they do everything possible to one can only feel that a reset in the entire system is needed. What goes on in public sector procurement is not tolerated in the private sector because it is so inefficient.