LUNARC was formed as a collaboration between groups in Theoretical Chemistry, Physical Chemistry 2, and Structural Mechanics in 1986. The founding members were later joined by Theoretical Physics and in 1996, LUNARC was transformed into a centre for scientific and technical computing at Lund University.

Together with five other centres, LUNARC became a part of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) in 2003. SNIC lasted until the end of 2022. The successor, the National Academic Infrastrucutre for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS) started 2023 and LUNARC will form a branch.

Over the years, LUNARC has gone through four stages - mainframe, workstations, multicore machines, and PC clusters.

Today LUNARC is funded by Lund University, the Faculty of Science, the Faculty of Engineering, and the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology. Although the original groups still represent a large portion of the usage, they are now but a few among many different groups using the LUNARC systems.