MEGWARE TOP500 Cluster has been inaugurated in Vienna

Chemnitz, 28 June 2011 - Vienna Scientific Cluster 2 (VSC-2) has been awarded place 56 among the most powerful supercomputers all over the world

For the first time, Austria is represented in the TOP500 list among the 100 most powerful supercomputers all over the world. The VSC-2 system delivered by the company MEGWARE offers 135.6 teraflops per second and is thus Austria’s fastest computer. In the current ranking, it occupies an outstanding 56th place.

The results of the TOP500 list were announced within the framework of the International Supercomputing Conference 2011 in Hamburg. At the time of the announcement of the TOP500 position, an inauguration ceremony for the VSC-2 cluster was held in Vienna where political and scientific personalities appreciated the importance of the new, powerful supercomputer for the scientific and research landscape in Austria.

"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“.

Ms. Sabine Seidler, Vice-Rector of the Vienna University of Technology, also underlined the importance of the MEGWARE cluster: „Until now, powerful large-scale computers have already been an indispensable tool for our research activities. With the VSC-2 supercomputer, we are now among the international leaders in this field and will be able to produce a wide range of outstanding research results arousing much attention in future, too.“

Professor Herbert Störi, Scientific Project Manager, confirms that the MEGWARE system offers a particularly high energy efficiency. This was an essential criterion of decision when the order was awarded: „The new VSC-2 system will operate in water-cooled cabinets with a flow temperature of 18 degrees instead of six degrees cold water as usually used in older systems. This results in a significant reduction of the costs incurred.“

Stefano Chiavegati, Sr. Manager Channel Marketing, AMD is certain: “The processors of the Opteron line combine high computing capacity with low power consumption. Together with this efficient and innovative cooling concept, it is a future-oriented approach to operate very high performance computers like the VSC-2 system economically and to make research even more environmentally friendly.“

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.

Besides AMD, ASUS, Kingston and Zippy are important partners in this project.

Figure 1: Dr. Karlheinz Töchterle, Federal Minister for Science and Research of Austria
Figure 2: Ms. Sabine Seidler, Vice-Rector of the Vienna University of Technology
(Source: Vienna University of Technology)