Provisioning an HPC infrastructure for the North German states

The North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) is a partnership of seven federal states of Germany as well as the federal ministry of education and research (BMBF). Since the start of the NHR alliance in 2021 HLRN‘s operating sites, University of Göttingen/GWDG and Zuse Institute Berlin are being funded as two centers - NHR@Göttingen and NHR@ZIB, respectively - which ensure the support of various focus application domains, such as Life Sciences, Earth System Sciences, Digital Humanities, Chemistry, and CFD. They also advance HPC methods, for example in the areas of heterogeneous memory hierarchies or data management and workflows. This is achieved in collaboration with various competence centers in the HLRN states which provide tier 3 HPC resources to their local users and contribute the experience of their consultants to the HLRN network of expertise. The scope of our project is to integrate the research-enabling activities of the HLRN, such as demand-driven system procurements, scientific and technical review of compute time applications, code optimization, user support and training opportunities, with the NHR alliance in order to ultimately serve the needs of HPC users across Germany in a coordinated fashion.

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Contributors:

• Thomas Steinke (Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB))
• Christian Boehme (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen)
• Julian Kunkel (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen)
• Christian Köhler (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen)
• Stephan Frickenhaus (Alfred-Wegener-Institut)
• Matthias Läuter (Zuse-Institut Berlin)