Flanders invests €8.6 million in the purchase of a new Flemish supercomputer

The Japanese high-tech company NEC Deutschland GmbH (NEC) will supply the new Flemish Tier-1 supercomputer, which is set to become operational in November at the VUB-Green Energy Park campus in Zellik (GEP). NEC emerged as the best candidate in the procurement process. The Tier-1 supercomputer is part of a platform of systems providing computing power, data storage, and cloud applications offered by the Flemish Supercomputer Centre (VSC) to researchers in knowledge institutions and companies across Flanders.

The supercomputer will run on green energy, and the heat it generates will be repurposed through water cooling and heat recovery to partially heat the buildings at GEP. The supercomputer will be housed in a specially designed space within the Nexus data centre and will be visible from the street.

The Tier-1 supercomputer is designed to meet the growing demand for AI in research and innovation. “Researchers who use non-AI applications will also be able to use the supercomputer,” says Ward Poelmans, Head of the Scientific Data & Compute (SDC) department within the VUB ICT Directorate, who has overseen the entire process from procurement and allocation to installation and commissioning in just two and a half years.

“Supercomputers have immense computing power and are perfect for accelerating scientific research,” says Flemish Minister-President Matthias Diependaele. “Thanks to this prestigious research infrastructure, Flemish researchers, knowledge institutions, businesses, industry, and the government can tackle the major challenges facing our society.”

“The official launch is scheduled for November 2025,” Poelmans adds. “From then on, researchers from Flemish knowledge institutions, governments, and companies can apply for computing time.” These institutions include all Flemish universities and universities of applied sciences, as well as government-funded research centres such as VITO, VIB, and IMEC. Many large companies, as well as SMEs, rely on the VSC’s supercomputers for their research and innovation projects. This significantly reduces the turnaround time for such projects, which benefits business competitiveness. Access to the high-performance supercomputers is managed by the SDC team at VUB, which acts as the VSC-wide contact point for businesses and SMEs.

“Supercomputers are of strategic importance for Flanders,” says the Minister-President. “Flemish researchers, governments, and industry can use this infrastructure to address society’s major challenges. We invest heavily in scientific research, but we also want to ensure that the results of these projects are maximally transferred to the Flemish economy and society. Thanks to the supercomputer, we can accelerate scientific research and further strengthen our European leadership in innovation and research.”

The new supercomputer will be housed in the Nexus Data Centre at the VUB Green Energy Park site, which also hosts the data centres of VUB and UZ Brussel. It is the greenest and most high-performance data centre in Belgium. This aligns with VUB’s ambition to develop the research park into a fully-fledged innovation campus. “The Flemish supercomputer will be used intensively, among other things, to calculate future scenarios with complex climate models within our inter-university climate research consortium,” says Professor Wim Thiery (VUB).

The potential applications are vast. Thanks to the supercomputer, scientists have been able to model brain function in both health and disease. They have also developed a more cost-effective innovation technology that removes CO₂ from exhaust gases using the waste heat from those gases. The supercomputer also played a crucial role in the fight against the coronavirus, helping to map the spread of the virus in great detail.

“The supercomputing power we need today and in the future will be delivered by the Tier-1 supercomputer to Flemish universities, research centres, and businesses,” says VUB Rector Jan Danckaert. “For us at VUB, it is an honour to host and manage it in the Nexus Data Centre at our Green Energy Park campus in Zellik. It provides a turbo boost for scientific research and innovation. The recent developments in AI, and those still to come, have only been possible thanks to the availability of vast computing power. At our Artificial Intelligence Lab, they are well aware that if we and other Flemish universities want to remain at the forefront of AI research, access to a supercomputer is essential.”

The funding was made possible by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), which, with support from the Flemish government, is investing €8.6 million in the purchase of the new Flemish supercomputer.