BERLIN, Germany, Dec. 1 — The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) announced today that for the most recent 12th Call for Large-Scale Projects, it allocated a previously unachieved number of computing core hours for scientific research activities: A total of 1,029 million core hours have been granted to 17 outstanding scientific research projects. The consortia of national researchers and scientists whose projects were selected for funding are provided access to the petascale supercomputing infrastructures of the three GCS member centres High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre München-Garching (LRZ) starting immediately. The supported ambitious simulation projects represent leading-edge research activities in scientific fields such as Aerodynamics, Astrophysics, Biology and Life Sciences, Elementary Particle Physics, Fluid Dynamics, and Theoretical Chemistry.

For its 12th Call for Large-Scale Projects, which was open from July 31 to August 29, 2014, the GCS received a total of 23 applications for simulation projects, which by itself marks a new record. The requested computing time summed up to more than 1.5 billion core hours – a number that is another all-time-high in the history of GCS. Eventually, 17 national computational science projects – yet another mile stone – met the strict GCS large-scale project qualification criteria and were awarded with a total of more than 1 billion core hours of computing time on the GCS high-performance computing (HPC) systems. This allocation of computing hours almost triples the computing time granted with the preceding 11th call which closed six months ago.

“It is very rewarding to see that the scientific community increasingly realizes the vast potential our world-class HPC resources provide to support their ambitious research pro- jects,” states Professor Dr. Ing. Siegfried Wagner, Chairman of the GCS Scientific Steering Committee. “The feed-back we receive from our users repeatedly confirms that we are on the right track: We do provide them with system architectures that meet their needs, and by additionally offering the necessary software, tools and HPC expertise to run their projects in a highly efficient way, users quite clearly acknowledge the added value our resources and services provide for tackling their scientific challenges,” explains Professor Wagner the research community’s ever increasing demand for high-performance computing power.

The approved large-scale projects are distributed between the three GCS HPC systems Hornet of HLRS, JUQUEEN of JSC, and SuperMUC of LRZ. To optimally meet the requirements of projects coming from the varying scientific fields, these HPC systems are of complementary system architecture—a fact that in particular one applicant of the 12th call is benefitting from: The almost 70M core hours of computing time, granted to Prof. Dr. Rainer Sommer of DESY Zeuthen (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) for his project “Non- Perturbative Heavy Quark Effective Theory and the Strong Coupling” are divided up between the IBM Blue Gene/Q system of JSC and the IBM iDataPlex supercomputer of LRZ.

With the 12th GCS Large Scale Call, the largest individual allotments of computing hours were granted to the following projects:

Astrophysics:

Illustris++: Predicting Galaxy Formation in a Representative Volume of the Universe Prof. Dr. Volker Springel (University of Heidelberg) — 92M core hours on Hornet of High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS)

Biology and Life Sciences:

How Does the HIV Virus Hijack the Human Nuclear Pore Complex?
Prof. Dr. Grubmüller (MPI Göttingen) — 40M core hours on SuperMUC of Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Garching (LRZ)

Chemistry:

Mechanochemistry of Covalent Bond Breaking from First Principles Simulations Prof. Dr. Dominik Marx, Ruhr-Universität Bochum — 58M core hours on JUQUEEN of Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC)

Elementary Particle Physics:

Lattice QCD with Wilson Quarks at Zero and Non-Zero Temperature Prof. Dr. Hartmut Wittig, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz — 72.1M core hours on JUQUEEN of Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC)

Scientific Engineering:

LAMTUR: Investigation of Laminar-Turbulent Transition and Flow Control in Boundary Layers – Prof. Dr. Ing. Ulrich Rist, IAG, Universität Stuttgart — 128M core hours on Hornet of High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS)

Computing time allocations for GCS Large-Scale Projects are dispersed based on scientific criteria and their technical feasibility through independent reviewers in a peer-review process led by the GCS Scientific Steering Committee. Computing time is available for a period of 12 months. The complete list of approved GCS Large Scale Projects (12th Call) can be found at http://www.gauss-centre.eu/gauss-centre/EN/Projects/LargeScaleProjects/call-12.html

About GCS Large-Scale Projects

In accordance with the mission of the Gauss Centre for Super- computing, all scientists and researchers in Germany have access to the petascale HPC systems of Germany’s leading supercomputing institution. Projects are classified as “large-scale” if they require more than 35M core-hours in one year on a GCS member centre’s high-end system. Computing time on the GCS systems is allocated by the GCS Scientific Steering Committee to scientifically leading, ground- breaking projects which deal with complex, demanding, and innovative simulations that would not be possible without the GCS petascale infrastructure. The projects are evaluated via a strict peer-review process on the basis of the project’s scientific and technical excellence.

About GCS

The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three national supercomputing centres HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) into Germany’s Tier-0 supercomputing institution. Concertedly, the three centres provide the largest and most powerful supercomputing infrastructure in all of Europe to serve a wide range of industrial and research activities in various disciplines. They also provide top-class training and education for the national as well as the European High Performance Computing (HPC) community. GCS is the German member of PRACE (Partnership for Advance Computing in Europe), an international non- profit association consisting of 25 member countries, whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.

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Source: Gauss Centre for Supercomputing