Austria's Fastest Supercomputer to Date Is Powered by AMD Opteron CPUs

Austrian officials have recently held an inauguration ceremony for the Vienna Scientific Cluster 2, VSC-2 for short, which is now listed at number 56 in the TOP500 supercomputer list thanks to its 21,000 AMD Opteron processor cores.

Built by the German company Megware, the system is able to deliver 135.6 teraflops of performance, while its peak computational power is rated at 185 teraflops.

The VSC-2 supercomputer was developed as 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 and each one of these node features two AMD Opteron 6132 HE processors with eight computational cores running at a clock speed of 2.2GHz, and are connected together using Infiniband QDR interconnects.

In order to cool all the nodes that are installed in the system, Megware has installed all the hardware inside water-cooled cabinets with a flow temperature of 18 degrees Celsius.

Compared to other such systems that require six degrees cold water, the new Megware design significantly reduces the operating costs of the VSC-2 supercomputer and increases its energy effieciency.

“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,” concluded Dr. Töchterle.

The VSC-2 is Austria's premier supercomputer to reach the first 100 position in the TOP500 list and its acquisitions costs totaled approximately 4.2 million Euros.