Supercomputer in Vienna ranked 301

The Technical University (TU) in Vienna announced on Tuesday that the computer reached 301 with the benchmark value of 2.31 petaflops achieved in the current configuration. She said the true performance of the next HPC expansion phase remains to be seen. However, since it is a matter of two “different architectures”, VSC-5 likely will not ever reach or exceed the computing power measured in petaflops in order – one petaflop meaning quadrillion computing operations per second – of its predecessor, VSC-4.

“This is relatively unrelated to us,” Herbert Storey of the VSC Research Center at TU Vienna told APA. “The VSC-5 is not very fast in this race, but it is much stronger for practical applications,” he said. The most powerful computer in Störi Austria was officially put into operation with “Vienna Scientific Cluster 4” (VSC-4). This supercomputer, which costs eight million euros and a computing power of 2.7 petaflops, ranks 218th in the current ranking.

The practical importance of the arrangement is unimportant

The world’s fastest supercomputer has been included in the Top 500 New Machines list. A practically worthless list of Vienna scholars. Everyone will look at the top 500 ratings of supercomputers, Storey said, “but their practical importance, especially for smaller systems, is slowly approaching zero.”

Instead, he sees the mission of the Vienna Scientific Cluster as “to serve many small functions. We need a system that is accessible, where almost everything works, and where you can have reasonable performance without any special modifications.”

‘Annoying’ supply chain issues

In fact, the new supercomputer was supposed to be ready in the fall of last year, but supply chain problems would have delayed this plan. For example, “a certain motherboard is missing due to the lack of a specific chip” and there were even computer room air-conditioning problems due to the unavailability of double wood floorboards. “It’s a very disturbing situation,” says Storey.

The Ministry of Education bears the costs of approximately ten million euros for VSC-5 through performance agreements with universities. The “Vienna Science Park” is a joint project of the Technical University of Vienna and Graz, the Universities of Vienna, Innsbruck and Linz and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna.