The next-generation supercomputer, the most powerful available to researchers in Europe, will be sited at Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire.
A joint team from Daresbury and Edinburgh University will run the service, called HPC(X), from December.
The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (£48 million) and the Natural Environment Research Council (£5 million).
The computer is ten times more powerful than the Cray in Manchester and will enable complex modelling of areas such as drug design, flight simulation and the structure of the earth.