German supercomputing network to be most powerful in Europe

The German Government, which has allocated funding of €30 million to the project, hopes the initiative will raise the visibility of the centres involved and improve their chances of playing a key role in the establishment of a European high-performance computer network.

The Gauss Centre unites the High-Performance Computing Centre Stuttgart, the Leibniz Computing Centre in Garching near Munich and two computers of the John von Neumann institute for Computing in Jülich. Currently the three centres have a joint computing power of 90 teraflops, and by 2009 they hope to increase this figure to over 1,000 teraflops.

"This collaboration represents the foundation of a German national centre for supercomputing," said Professor Achim Bachem, spokesman for the Gauss Centre and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Jülich Research Centre. "As the three outstanding German supercomputing centres we represent the most powerful centre in Europe."

The goal of the GCS is to provide world-class supercomputing power for computational science and engineering for Germany and Europe. To achieve this, the partners will work closely with one another to coordinate their activities. Applications for computing time will be evaluated on a common basis and software projects will be jointly developed. They will also work together to provide training and user support services.

At the EU level, the partners hope their collaboration will see one of the planned European supercomputing centres sited in Germany. Together with other European partners, they are also applying for EU funding for the preparation of a European supercomputer infrastructure.

The new super computing network will find application in a range of fields, including climate research, high energy physics, astronomy, medical research and engineering.

For further information, please visit:
http://www.gauss-centre.eu