Supercomputers/Systems/VSC-1
Austria · operational · hpc
VSC-1
Also known as Vienna Scientific Cluster 1; VSC-1 TU Wien
Operated by Vienna Scientific Cluster at Vienna Scientific Cluster .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 35.48 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 38.84 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 91.3%
- Cores
- 3,650
- Power
- 178 kW
- Per watt
- 0.2 GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - Sun Blade x2270 blade cluster, 476 nodes | Sun Microsystems | - | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon X5550 quad-core 2.66 GHz, two per node | Intel | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR Interconnect Fat tree · 40 Gb/s per 4x port QDR InfiniBand | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
The first Vienna Scientific Cluster, built for TU Wien, the University of Vienna and BOKU. The VSC documentation lists VSC-1 as installed in 2009 in the Freihaus building of TU Wien with 476 nodes of two Xeon X5550 processors, 24 GB of RAM per node and QDR InfiniBand, retired at the end of March 2015, and says it ranked 156th on the November 2009 TOP500. A TU Wien news item reports the opening on 27 November 2009 with more than 35 TFlop/s and more than 4,000 cores, funded with two million euros. The TOP500 web list shows rank 157 for the Sun Blade x2270 entry with 3,650 cores at 35.48 TFlop/s Rmax, 38.84 TFlop/s Rpeak and 178 kW (the XML download numbers it 156th), then 213th and 356th in November 2010, its last appearance. Core counts differ between sources, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added VSC-1
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| docs.vsc.ac.at | names system and part | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
| top500.org | does not name this system | Mellanox InfiniBand QDR |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.
Inside a node
Latency-optimised versus throughput-optimised processors, NUMA, and the end of the host-to-device copy.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.