A large scale numerical simulation in the field of lattice gauge theory has been performed, relevant for elementary particle physics. Lattices of size 64×243 have been studied on a cluster of IBM RISC System/6000-workstations, on an IBM 9076 SP1 parallel computer with 8 nodes and on other parallel computers. A sustained performance of 30 MFLOPS/node has been reached (without special tuning steps), and a speedup of 7.1 has been found for 8 nodes on the IBM 9076 SP1. Details on the computational aspects are given. We investigate the static quark-antiquark potential up to the distance of 8 lattice spacings for pure SU(2) lattice gauge theory. Numerical simulations are performed in a large range of bare coupling constants. The action is the Wilson action with an asymmetric coupling for timelike plaquettes. The potential is obtained by fitting ’cooled’ Wilson loops with up to 3 exponential terms. An interpolation of the potentials by a sum of a perturbative and a linear term shows only approximate scaling in comparison with the symmetric