The Vienna University of Technology, University of Vienna and University for Soil Management have awarded an order for a new scientific supercomputer to Chemnitz-based company Megware Computer. The computer is named ‘Vienna Scientific Cluster 2 (VSC-2) and will be delivered in May 2011, providing Vienna’s scientific community with a powerful and energy-efficient system.
The cluster is a follow-up system to the ‘Vienna Scientific Cluster’ (VSC) which, when installed in 2009, was Austria’s fastest supercomputer. However, the capacity of this high-performance system was exhausted after a few months and additional computing power was urgently required.
Following a Europe-wide call for tenders the order was awarded to Megware. The requirements were that the entire system had to be energy efficiency and have a very high raw data throughput. Project manager Herbert Störi from the Vienna University of Technology said: ‘The new VSC-2 will be able to compute applications in water-cooled cabinets with an inlet temperature of 18 degrees instead of previous systems normally using six degrees cold water. The result is a significant reduction of energy costs required for the cooling of the system.’
The supercomputer includes more than 1,300 servers developed by Megware, each of which is equipped with two AMD Opteron Magny Cours 6132HE processors. Thus, the system is equipped with a total of more than 21,000 processor cores for scientific computing operations. With 150 Tflops, i.e. 150 trillion computing operations per second, the computer is five times more powerful than its predecessor.
