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MUSICA

Note

MUSICA will presumably go into test operation at the beginning of 2025

In the past, Austria's most powerful supercomputers (the Vienna Scientific Clusters, VSCs) had been jointly operated by several universities - but so far in a central location, with online access for all participating institutions. Distributing the computer hardware itself across several locations and thus connecting high-performance computing with cloud computing is an innovation of the MUSICA project.

The part of MUSICA in Vienna will have 112 GPU and 72 CPU nodes. The parts in Innsbruck and Linz each over 80 GPU and 48 CPU nodes. The hardware is supplied by Lenovo, the storage of MEGWARE. This architecture will most benefit from the users who perform particularly data-intensive calculations, especially training models of artificial intelligence models to apply AI models to research questions from natural science and technology, and to analyze large amounts of data.

Performance

With MUSICA, users get significantly more computing power: The fastest supercomputers in Austria, VSC-4 and VSC-5 to date, provide a performance of 5.01 petaflops (calculation collaborations per second). The new HPC cluster will provide a computing power of around 40 petaflops, which will line up it among the most powerful systems in the world.

Cooling

The system is largely directly water-cooled - the heat is conveyed by means of water-consumed cooling elements on processors, GPUs and labor memory, which massively reduces the energy requirement for cooling. Due to high water temperatures of about 40 °C, the waste heat can be discharged directly to the ambient air almost all year round, without additional energy-intensive refrigerators. The high cooling water temperature allows the reuse of the waste heat. In Vienna, this is done to heat neighboring buildings.