HPE wins Arrhenius contract
After a thorough procurement process, NAISS and EuroHPC JU (Joint Undertaking) have awarded HPE the contract to deliver the new Swedish supercomputer, Arrhenius.
10 June 2025
“We are very pleased with this outcome. We are getting a considerably faster and more capable system than we initially thought possible. This will greatly benefit our users”, says Gert Svensson, NAISS Deputy Technical Director and Arrhenius project manager who has led a team of more than 20 people working on specifications for the system and evaluating bids.
The configuration of the HPC partition includes 424 AMD Turin 128-core CPUs and 382 GPU nodes, each with four Grace Hopper Superchips from Nvidia. There will also be one partition for cloud computing and another partition dedicated to sensitive data. Storage is provided by a fast parallel file system of 29 PB (petabytes).
The GPU part is expected to have an HPL (High-Performance Linpack) performance of more than 60PFLOPS – approximately seven times that of the current most powerful NAISS system, Dardel.
On-site engineer included
“Gert and the teams from NAISS and EuroHPC have done a fantastic job. This marks a milestone for Sweden as it is our first new national HPC system, and the first time that we will be hosting a node in the international EuroHPC infrastructure. But, above all, it is an investment in groundbreaking research across all fields of science,” says NAISS Director Erik Lindahl.
The contract includes training and collaboration efforts to port and optimise scientific applications to Arrhenius. To ensure good service and maintenance, HPE will also place an on-site engineer at NAISS.
“This is new technology which is support-demanding, and we have strict accessibility requirements,” Gert Svensson explains.
“HPE a clear winner”
Arrhenius will be installed in a new computer hall currently under construction in Linköping. The hardware will be delivered in phases, with the first sections scheduled to arrive in the autumn of 2025. The system is expected to come online in the spring of 2026.
According to Gert Svensson, the procurement generated significant interest among vendors.
“At least two of the bids that we received were excellent. However, HPE emerged as the clear winner due to considerably larger performance, as well as an extensive collaboration programme to develop and improve scientific software.”
A joint project between NAISS and EuroHPC JU
The total value of the Arrhenius project is estimated at EUR68 million. Funding is shared between the Swedish Research Council through NAISS (65 percent) and EuroHPC JU (35 percent), with each party controlling and allocating a corresponding share of resources.
The system is named after Swedish geologist and chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius who discovered the mineral gadolinite.
Contact: Gert Svensson, gert@naiss.se