Request for proposals for new supercomputer Arrhenius

NAISS and EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) have launched a request for proposals (RFP) for the acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance of the new supercomputer Arrhenius. It will be placed at Campus Valla in Linköping, Sweden.

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The RFP, which is the second stage of the procurement process, is sent to vendors who have passed the qualification round and demonstrated economic and technical capacity to deliver such a system.

The total value of the contract (investment and support) and estimated operational cost is EUR 68,5 million for five years. Funding is shared between the Swedish Research Council via NAISS (65 percent) and EuroHPC JU (35 percent), with each party controlling and allocating the corresponding share of resources.

“The growing market demand for AI is driving up prices for high-performance computing (HPC), making it challenging to forecast Arrhenius’ performance accurately. However, we expect it to be in the range of 30-40 petaflops”, says Gert Svensson, NAISS Deputy Technical Director and Arrhenius Project Manager.

Arrhenius is set to significantly boost the compute resources available to Swedish researchers and academic users. It will be capable of performing the most advanced simulations in science and technology as well as tasks like artificial intelligence, machine learning and other demanding applications. It will also enable NAISS to provide more diverse storage and cloud access, which will benefit all users.

The new system, which is expected to come online in 2025, is named after Swedish geologist and chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius who discovered the mineral gadolinite.

The deadline to submit a proposal is 31 January 2025, 23:59 CET.