Lenovo has announced a strategic partnership with the University of Southampton, which will see it supply the higher education institution with high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.

The university signed a £7 million order for a new HPC system, Iridis 7, which is due over the summer. The university said this will expand the computational power available to its researchers.

In its initial phase, the HPC deployment will see Lenovo provide ThinkSystem SR675 V3 servers, which contain Nvidia H200 GPUs chips optimised for high-performance workloads such as AI inference and simulations.

In the next phase, the firm will provide Lenovo ThinkSystem SC777 V4 Neptune Servers containing Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips.

Andy Rhodes, managing director at Lenovo UK & Ireland, said: “As research demands continue to grow in scale and complexity, access to powerful, scalable computing is critical.”

“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.”

The University of Southampton aims for Iridis 7 to rank in the TOP500, a bi-annual list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The last time it made the list was with Iridis 5, which ranked 252nd worldwide in November 2017.

In addition to its infrastructure delivery, Lenovo will also work with the university to support researchers as they adopt new technologies and build on its end-user computing capabilities.

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