Public Higher Education Bulletin

This emergency/quick purchase was required due to a situation in which items available on the spot market or at discounted prices were available for a limited time such that sound business judgment mandated a purchase immediately to take advantage of the availability and price.

This University of Illinois at Chicago participates with fifty-seven collaborating institutions in a research project titled Star (Solenoidal Tracker at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) funded by the U.S. Department of Energy at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York (DOE grant number DE-FG02-94ER40865).

As part of this research collaboration there is need to purchase a Colfax 18-rack mounted computing server system equipped with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The Colfax servers along with other participating university servers with the same configuration will form the STAR data acquisition system. This acquisition system runs extremely complicated trigger algorithms that are key in selecting events of interest in real time relying on this high performance computing hardware of the Intel Xeon CPUs and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.

The Colfax server system is available on a limited basis as the quote received by the manufacturer expires on December 15, 2015. As this server system is essential for the research, prudent business judgement is to process as an Emergency Quick Purchase.

The servers will be shipped directly to Brookhaven National Laboratory where Physics scientists faculty and graduate students will receive training as well as conduct research throughout the project period.