MUSICA

Note

MUSICA is currently under the acceptance test. The user testing phase will be later in the year.

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.

Performance

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

Hardware

MUSICA is co-located in Innsbruck, Linz, and Vienna. The parts in Innsbruck and Linz each have 48 CPU and 80 GPU nodes, while the part in Vienna has 72 CPU and 112 GPU nodes. The hardware is supplied by Lenovo and the storage by MEGWARE.

The CPU nodes are comprised of 2x AMD Epyc 9654 (96 cores each) with 768GB DDR5 RAM, SharedIO NDR200 infiniband (20 of the Vienna nodes with NDR400) and a local NVMe with 1.92TB. The GPU nodes have 2x AMD Epyc 9654 (96 cores each) with 768GB DDR5 RAM, 4x Nvidia SXM5 H100-94G-700W GPUs, 4x NDR200 infiniband and a local NVMe with 7.68TB. This architecture will mostly benefit users that perform data-intensive calculations, especially training models of artificial intelligence models applied to research questions from natural science and technology, and to analyze large amounts of data.

All nodes are connected to a fast scratch storage consisting of a 4PB all-flash Weka filesystem at each site. In Vienna, it will also be connected to the main storage of the VSC clusters.

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 neighbouring buildings.