Austria has introduced MUSICA, a formidable supercomputer equipped with 1,088 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, capable of performing an astonishing 45.11 petaflops, or 45,110 trillion calculations per second. This new machine ranks among the world’s top 100 fastest supercomputers, marking a significant leap in the country’s computational capacity.
Developed as a versatile high-performance computing (HPC) system, MUSICA supports both traditional scientific simulations and modern artificial intelligence workloads. Its AI-optimized GPUs allow researchers to train large machine learning models and neural networks while running complex simulations across disciplines such as physics, chemistry, life sciences, and environmental science.
Built through a collaboration of multiple Austrian universities and research institutions under the Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC) consortium, the project is spearheaded by the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). Partner institutions include the University of Vienna, BOKU University, University of Innsbruck, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Graz University of Technology, and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA).
The participating universities gain free access to MUSICA, while private companies and public organizations can utilize its resources through a pay-per-use model. This accessibility aims to encourage a broad base of users to leverage Austria’s new computational power for research and development.
The supercomputer’s output surpasses by more than eight times the combined computing strength of Austria’s previous VSC-4 and VSC-5 systems. It also integrates cloud servers and supports Austria’s first production-ready quantum computer, the OTTER trapped-ion quantum system, thus expanding the country’s technological infrastructure.
Officials view MUSICA as a cornerstone for advancing Austria’s position in research, innovation, AI, and emerging quantum technologies. Steady operational funding has been emphasized as crucial to maintain this cutting-edge facility and ensure it delivers consistent, world-class performance.