The Department of Interior, Acquisition Services Directorate (AQD) in Herndon, Virginia intends to negotiate and award a firm-fixed price purchase order to HUBzero Platform for Scientific Collaboration. For the following service/product: A critical element of the NCIP is to establish a sustainable online resource for the NCI and the larger cancer community to better disseminate and support cancer research digital computing capabilities. This platform shall serve bench and computational scientists as well as educators to allow comprehensive access to data, tools and other resources in a collaborative environment. This requires that the research community be able to access and deliver interactive tools and workflows via an ordinary web-browser. The tools and capabilities must be deployable without having to develop or rewrite special code for the web and the users computes must be run and visualized without having to reserve time on a supercomputer/wait for a batch job to engage. An individual registered user with little or no informatics resources/expertise should have the ability to test a tool, and share their datasets. There is also a requirement to support open source development and enable tool developers and other computational biologists to directly interact with and establish communities with the bench scientists (end users of the tools to answer specific hypotheses driven questions and drive biological projects). The community requires a platform that supports upload of new resources to serve as a market place to access, share and learn from each others tools and data. The resources should be categorized/tagged to enable easy browsing and/or search capability and most importantly support a self-service model. To accelerate community/team research, there is a requirement for the desired cyber-infrastructure to appropriately leverage and seamlessly integrate social-media and crowd-sourcing techniques in the platform to support team science. Wikis and blogs supported should be integrated with the larger system. Users should have the ability to restrict group/community size for private collaboration. Users should be able to rate resources and other feedback mechanisms should be built in to gather new product/service ideas, requirements and feature requests for current tools. The ratings and citations for resources combined with tracked web statistics should provide a true measure of the value and success of the resources and serve as evaluation criteria. The required cyber-infrastructure must be open-source and have an established community of developers supporting it. The platform itself must be scalable to address the anticipated data volume, compute power, large number of (over 200,000) users and concurrent sessions (more than 10,000). The system should support large (> 50 terabytes) of data storage and be flexible to allow computes and storage in open-source grids and clouds. The platform should meet not only the federally required systems security requirements but must also address the more stringent requirements for sensitive electronic patient and outcomes data. The platform must be available allow for migration to NCIs own hardware at a future date. There are a limited number of scientific or research platforms that provide one or more of the requirements identified; however, there is only one that provides all mandatory requirements and that can be sustained to support scientific collaboration to accelerate research. This is the HUBzero platform. This proven product has been successfully demonstrated by the nearly forty hubs implemented by diverse scientific domains. The project envisions the use of the HUBzero Platform for scientific collaboration to create an online collaboratory" to support cancer research. The hub will contain an electronic library of tools, along with data sets, community forums, seminars, tutorials, teaching materials and other resources contributed by the community for the community. The order will be issued on behalf of the National Cancer Institute. AQD will use procedures that provide for issuance of the order on the basis of other than full and open competition that are authorized by Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) in Subpart 6.302-1(a)(2). The services needed are highly specialized and market research indicates that the services appear to not be otherwise available to the government. This notice is not a formal solicitation. This is not considered a Request for Quotation (RFQ) nor is it a Request for Proposal (RFP). No solicitation document is available and telephone requests will not be honored. No task order will be awarded on the basis of quotation or offers received in response to this notice. Any response to this notice must show clear, compelling and convincing evidence that competition will be advantageous to the Government. If no affirmative written response is received, the contract will be awarded without further notice. A determination by the Government not to compete the proposed contract on this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. Information related to the potential availability of other sources that can fulfill this requirement must be received by the POC listed below no later than 1PM eastern time on Tuesday, January 21 , 2013, at
[email protected]. TELEPHONIC QUESTIONS OR REQUESTS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED OR ACKNOWLEDGED.