For the first time, an Austrian supercomputer has made the TOP500 list. Developed by MEGWARE, the VSC-2 system has been deployed in Vienna with 135.6 teraflops of performance, coming in at #56 on the list fo the world’s fastest systems.
“With the beginning of the second expansion stage, Vienna as a location for science is now equipped with a powerful research turbo which creates new resources for computer simulations that gain increasing importance in many fields of science and research” emphasizes Dr. Karlheinz Töchterle, Minister for Science and Research of the Republic of Austria within the framework of the opening ceremony. „Together with the German manufacturer MEGWARE, we have created a future-oriented infrastructure for the promotion of research.”
Chosen for its energy efficiency, the VSC-2 system uses “warm-water” cooling with an input temperature of up to 18 degrees. Comparable systems require chilled water, and this results in a significant reduction in operating costs.
The VSC-2 supercomputer is a joint project of the Vienna University of Technology, the University of Vienna and the Vienna University for Soil Management. The system contains a total of 1314 compute nodes. Each node has two processors of type AMD Opteron 6132 HE with a clock rate of 2.2 GHz and each time eight processor cores. With this, the users of these three Vienna universities have more than 21,000 processor cores at their disposal for scientific computing operations. The acquisition costs amount to approximately 4.2 million Euro. Read the Full Story.
