After the successful completion of the endurance test stage, the Vienna
Scientific Cluster 2 at the location of the Vienna University of
Technology has been handed over to the users for operation. The
scientists and students of three Vienna-based universities have now full
access to the computing power of the system. They will be able to
access 1,314 compute nodes. Each node is provided with two processors of
type AMD Opteron 6132 HE with a clock rate of 2.2 GHz and each time
eight processor cores. The nodes are connected with a high-speed
Infiniband network which provides a data throughput of 32 Gigabits per
second.
The cluster system is used for computing and simulation operations in a
wide range of research areas. Its applications range from materials
research and genetics up to astrophysics and climate research.
The system has been optimised within the framework of comprehensive
tests. Following a number of additional TOP500 runs, the VSC-2 now
reaches a performance of 152.9 teraflops/s, an increase of more than 12 %
over the measurements carried out in Summer 2011. In June, the system
reached a value of 135.6 teraflops/s and, with this, place 56 in the
TOP500 list.