The Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC), created to satisfy the demand for High Performance Computing (HPC) of a consortium of five Austrian universities, released a competitive tender to build the most powerful supercomputer in Austria. However, this was not your regular competitive bid process where systems that meet the minimum requirement compete purely on the bid price. The VSC took a long-term perspective towards cost and performance, they defined very specific targets and tests that reflected the long-term cost of the system. GRC came together with ClusterVision, Intel, and Supermicro to create a custom solution that came out well on top of the competition.

This paper will explore how GRC’s technology helped dramatically reduce the upfront cost and energy consumption of the system. Thereby allowing reallocation of capital towards more computing power