The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS) have awarded HPE the procurement contract for the forthcoming Arrhenius supercomputer.

Installation of the system is scheduled to begin in September and is planned to be completed in early 2026.

First announced in July 2023, the supercomputer will be hosted and operated by Sweden’s Linköping University (LiU). The “mid-range” system is expected to offer 60 petaflops of compute performance upon completion and will be made available to users across Europe, including the scientific community, industry, and the public sector, to support research into drug discovery, new materials design, and climate change mitigation.

Jointly funded by the EuroHPC JU, the Digital Europe Programme (DEP), and the Swedish Research Council’s funding for NAISS, the €68.5 million ($80m) system is named after Carl Axel Arrhenius, a Swedish geologist and chemist who discovered gadolinite in 1787. He was also a colleague of Jöns Jacob Berzelius, the father of Swedish chemistry, who has another supercomputer at LiU named after him.

Once operational, Arrhenius will also support artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) applications. The system will also be complemented by MIMER, one of five new AI-optimized supercomputers the EuroHPC JU has dubbed “AI Factories,” which is also located at the University of Linköping, in Sweden.

Launched in 2018 and headquartered in Luxembourg, EuroHPC JU is a joint initiative between the EU, 35 European countries, and private partners to develop a supercomputing ecosystem in Europe. It has helped fund the deployment of nine supercomputers to date and multiple quantum computers.

Through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the Commission previously announced plans for seven “AI factories” in December and will soon announce the next five, in a €10bn ($10.5bn) investment program.