19 June 2023

Linköping University has been selected to host a new supercomputer – Arrhenius. It will be one of the world’s fastest supercomputers and a resource for researchers in academia, industry and the public sector across Europe.

Data center at National Supercomputer Centre, Campus Valla, Linköping University.
The new supercomputer was named after the Swedish geologist and chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius, who discovered the mineral gadolinite. Photographer: Thor Balkhed

“Developments in computing power are extremely rapid and will lead to breakthroughs in many different research fields. Having the new European supercomputer at LiU will of course make a huge difference in our own research but will also mean that we will have a firm presence on the European arena,” says Matts Karlsson, deputy vice-chancellor for research at Linköping University, who led the group drawing up the application.

Arrhenius will have a calculation capacity of around 30 petaflops, which will make it one of the 20 fastest supercomputers in the world, and among the top five in Europe.

Portrait Matts Karlsson.Matts Karlsson, deputy vice-chancellor for research at Linköping University. Photo credit THOR BALKHED It is The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, EuroHPC JU, that has selected LiU to host the new supercomputer. Arrhenius will be part of a network of European supercomputers available to European researchers in academia as well as in industry.

World class computing power

NAISS – the organisation for supercomputers and large-scale calculations in Sweden – hosted by LiU, has responsibility for Arrhenius. Jan-Erik Sundgren is chair of the NAISS steering committee:

“Now that we have a new national organisation in place, the addition of Arrhenius is an immensely important piece of the puzzle in our efforts to realise the potential of NAISS and to assist Swedish and European researchers with world class computing power.”

The new supercomputer was named after the Swedish geologist and chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius, who discovered the mineral gadolinite. He was also a colleague of Jöns Jacob Berzelius, the father of Swedish chemistry, after whom another supercomputer at LiU is named.

More information about Arrhenius is available at: eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/news

Facts: NAISS (National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden); since the turn of the year a new organisation for supercomputers, hosted by Linköping University and funded by the Swedish Research Council. NAISS replaced SNIC (Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing). More information available at: naiss.se

Facts: EuroHPC JU was created in 2018 to enable coordination and resource pooling in the EU to make Europe a world leader in supercomputing. The EuroHPC JU budget for the period 2021–2027 is around EUR 7 billion. More information available at: eurohpc-ju.europa.eu

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