HPC Inauguration marks Milestone of National Collaboration

Since its acceptance into Germany’s National High Performance Computing Alliance (NHR) in 2021, the NHR South-West consortium - consisting of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU), Goethe University Frankfurt, and Saarland University – has taken an important step towards establishing a powerful, modern research infrastructure with the inauguration of the new high-performance computer (HPC) MOGON NHR South-West at JGU.

NHR South-West will be funded to the tune of EUR 7.5 million through the National High Performance Computing program of the German federal and state governments, with the state of Rhineland-Palatinate contributing EUR 3.75 million of this alone.

"NHR South-West has been able to make significant progress in further expanding its technical computing power. The new computer helps NHR South-West ensure that not only researchers at the four participating universities, but from all over Germany have sufficient computing capacity for their work. The use of high-performance computers has long since become indispensable in many fields of research due to the large volumes of data and the complexity of simulation calculations," said Clemens Hoch, Rhineland-Palatinate's Minister of Science.

"Fundamental research in the natural and life sciences requires sufficiently dimensioned computing resources," emphasised Professor Stefan Müller-Stach, Vice President for Research and Early Career Academics at Mainz University. "Working groups in many scientific disciplines depend on powerful high-performance computers to maintain and further extend their predominant position in various fields of research. Thus, we are very pleased to have this cutting-edge IT infrastructure at hand – in face of the increasing competition among universities both nationally and internationally in general and especially in the field of data processing."

The new MOGON NHR South-West computer will enable research groups to apply for computing time to advance research or in the fields of high-energy physics, condensed matter physics and the life sciences.

At the inauguration ceremony at JGU Professor Friederike Schmid explained the need for HPC, taking as an example the Multiscale Simulation Methods for Soft Matter Systems research project. As a member of the corresponding Collaborative Research Center funded by the German Research Foundation, she is investigating soft matter in various size and time scales. 

"The long-term goal of our research is to upgrade multiscale techniques so they can be used in routine simulations of real-world soft material applications. Multiscale techniques are used to solve problems where important processes occur in different magnitudes in space and / or time. We aim to be able to make predictions and suggestions as to how material properties can be tangibly improved and we can only do that with powerful computers running in the background," she added.

More information online