Anja Karliczek: "Crucial to safeguarding the quality of German university research and establishing Germany as a future-proof location for research and innovation".
Tailwind for National High-Performance Computing (NHR): Eight computing centers funded by the federal and state governments have joined forces to form a high-performance association by founding the "-Committeee für Nationals High Performance - NHR-Club Associates.". In this way, the members want to network more closely with each other and make computing capacities available throughout Germany. Prof. Dr. Christian Plessl from the University of Paderborn is a member of the board of the new association, which was launched yesterday evening in Berlin.
"By founding the association, the computing centers will be able to pool their competencies even better than before and provide an IT infrastructure nationwide that will boost science in general and high-performance computing in particular, both nationally and internationally," said Plessl. Through the association, scientists will have access to the computing capacity they need for their research, regardless of their respective locations. It also aims to strengthen education and training in scientific computing as well as the methodological competence of users.
Anja Karliczek, Federal Minister of Education and Research and Deputy Chair of the Joint Science Conference (GWK), said on the occasion of the foundation: "Germany must also be among the world leaders in the field of high-performance computing. To achieve this, we must allocate computing capacities in such a way that they provide researchers with the best possible basis for their work and thus benefit the country as a whole the most. After all, more and more research questions, for example about climate change, medicine or the materials sciences, can only be answered today through the use of large computing capacities and intelligent applications. In the future, the NHR Association will enable scientists to use modern high-performance computing infrastructures nationwide and independent of location according to a science-driven procedure. I am convinced that this will introduce researchers from a wide range of disciplines to high-performance computing and that their competencies can be built up and strengthened in the long term. This is crucial to ensure the quality of German university research and to position Germany as a sustainable location for research and innovation."
The University of Paderborn was already accepted into the network of National High-Performance Computing Centers (NHR) at the beginning of the year. At the end of the year, the first supercomputer, "Noctua 2", the second and approximately 14 million expansion stage of the "Noctua" installed in 2018, will move into the new HPC computing center (High Performance Computing) of the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC2), which is headed by Plessl.
