MEGWARE delivers Austria’s fastest scientific high-performance computer

Chemnitz, 7 February 2011 - Following a Europe-wide call for tenders, Vienna’s universities award order for Austria’s fastest supercomputer to MEGWARE Computer GmbH.

The Vienna University of Technology, the University of Vienna and the University for Soil Management have awarded an order for the fastest supercomputer ever built in Austria to the Chemnitz-based company MEGWARE Computer Vertrieb und Service GmbH. The computer is called „Vienna Scientific Cluster 2“ (VSC-2) and will be delivered in May 2011. With this computer, Vienna’s scientific workers will be provided with a powerful and energy-efficient system.

The total investment of Vienna’s universities into the new computer cluster amounts to EUR 4.2 million. The cluster is a follow-up system to the „Vienna Scientific Cluster“ (VSC) which was installed as early as 2009. By that time, the VSC was the fastest of Austria’s supercomputers. Because the capacity of this high-performance system was exhausted after only a couple of months, additional computing power was urgently required. In a Europe-wide call for tenders, MEGWARE was able to present a convincing concept. The call was for „first-class energy efficiency of the entire system and an enormously high raw data throughput“, says project manager Prof Herbert Störi from the Vienna University of Technology.

„The offer from MEGWARE has fully convinced us because 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 6 degrees cold water. The result is a significant reduction of energy costs required for the cooling of the system“.

The supercomputer from MEGWARE includes more than 1300 servers developed by MEGWARE, each of which is equipped with two processors of type AMD Opteron Magny Cours 6132HE. Thus, the system is equipped with a total of more than 21,000 processor cores for scientific computing operations. With 150 teraflops, i.e. 150 trillion computing operations per second, the computer is five times more powerful than its predecessor.

Jörg Heydemüller, representative of MEGWARE, is pleased with the order: „The fact that this significant IT order was awarded to a company from Chemnitz is very important for the location. It shows again the historic links existing between the Free State of Saxony and the microelectronic industry, as the project is implemented with the exclusive use of processors made by AMD."