Lenovo has announced it is partnering with the UK's University of Southampton to deliver “next-generation high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities” to power research and innovation.

The four-year agreement will see Lenovo serve as the university’s preferred HPC infrastructure supplier, helping to support its ambition of deploying a system that ranks on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

The University of Southampton has already ordered a supercomputer from Lenovo with an approximate value of £7 million ($9.2m), with the first phase of deployment set to include Lenovo ThinkSystem SR675 V3 servers, equipped with Nvidia H200 GPUs and NVLink technology. A second phase is expected to introduce an Nvidia Grace Blackwell-based cluster with Lenovo ThinkSystem SC777 V4 Neptune Servers.

The system has a planned delivery date this summer and is expected to “significantly expand” the university’s computational power, Lenovo said in a statement.

“As research demands continue to grow in scale and complexity, access to powerful, scalable computing is critical,” said Andy Rhodes, managing director, Lenovo UK & Ireland. “Lenovo’s latest HPC solutions, including next-generation GPU-accelerated systems, will enable the University of Southampton to tackle data-intensive workloads and accelerate breakthrough research. We are proud to support their ambition to further elevate their global research standing.”

Professor Mark Spearing, VP research and enterprise at the University of Southampton, added: “This partnership represents a major step forward in strengthening our research infrastructure. These new HPC capabilities will play a vital role in enabling cutting-edge research and innovation, helping to raise the global profile of Southampton’s research community and compete at the highest international level.”