23.09.2022
VSC-5: official opening
On 23 September 2022, the VSC-5 was inaugurated by the Federal Minister for Education, Science and Research Martin Polaschek.
The fifth generation of the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC-5) has an aggregated peak performance of 4.3 PFlop/s (millions of billions of floating point operations per second). For many HPC applications in use, the VSC-5 is twice as fast as its predecessor VSC-4 with both systems consuming almost the same amount of energy.
To meet the increasing demand for computing time, both systems, VSC-4 and VSC-5, will now be operated in parallel. Due to the different technical equipment, VSC-4 and VSC-5 can also be optimally used for different computing tasks. The individual nodes of the VSC-5 are equipped with very large main memory, which accommodates many applications. The cores of the VSC-4, on the other hand, have larger vector units, which, among other advantages, also explains its good ranking in the TOP500 list.
Despite its high computing power, the VSC-5 is even more energy-efficient than its predecessors. The partners placed great emphasis on this aspect during the tendering process, because not only does the acquisition of a high-performance computer involve high costs, but its ongoing operation is also expensive — especially in times of rising energy prices.
The Vienna Scientific Cluster consumes around 8,000,000 kWh of electricity per year, which corresponds to about one eighth of the total electricity consumption of the TU Wien. Scientific progress therefore has its price. Nevertheless, supercomputing is a necessary technology for cutting-edge research, and the VSC team ensures that these resources are used efficiently.
VSC family
VSC-5 is jointly operated by six Austrian universities: TU Wien, University of Vienna, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Graz University of Technology, University of Innsbruck, and Johannes Kepler University Linz.
The Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research is providing substantial funding for the large-scale project: "I am very pleased that Austria's most powerful supercomputer for science and research can begin operation with the VSC-5. These computing resources, which can be used by all researchers throughout Austria, will further accelerate scientific contributions in important areas such as climate change, medicine and even quantum research and ensure international competitiveness," says Minister Polaschek.
News posting of TU Wien (German)
(Announcement first posted on 23.09.2022.)