German science and technology company Merck KGaA has launched a supercomputer in Germany.

Housed in an Equinix data center in Germany, the system has been built on Lenovo ThinkSystem servers and will be used to support research into drug discovery and semiconductor materials.

No information about the hardware that will power the system has been detailed, but the company said the platform combines public and private cloud infrastructure, supporting “rapid scaling” to meet changing computational demands.

The supercomputer will also be liquid-cooled using Lenovo’s Neptune technology.

“At Lenovo, we are committed to enabling the global adoption of innovative and sustainable technologies,” said Andreas Thomasch, director and CTO, Germany and Austria, Lenovo. “By designing and configuring this solution together, we’ve demonstrated that organizations can achieve exceptional performance without compromising on sustainability. With Lenovo Neptune Liquid Cooling, even the most demanding workloads will run efficiently while helping Merck drive progress in both science and industry.”

“This platform empowers our teams to leverage AI and advanced analytics more effectively, ultimately accelerating the pace of innovation across our sectors,” added Laura Matz, chief science and technology officer, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.

Darmstadt is a city near Frankfurt in southwest Germany. Equinix opened the FR8 data center at its Frankfurt West campus in September 2021, and has nine more data centers at its Frankfurt North-East campus. Seven of the facilities on the North-East campus are retail colocation data centers, while FR9 and FR11 are xScale facilities. The latest addition, FR13, is the first IBX facility to be opened in Germany since FR8.

Frankfurt is home to a number of operators, including Digital Realty, Iron Mountain, CyrusOne, NTT, Green Mountain, Global Switch, Colt, Cogent, Vantage, Stack, EdgeConneX, Lumen, Kyndryl, and Telehouse.