High-Level User Support
A major task of the division is to provide expert support services and training in high performance computing (HPC) for users of the Research Centre's supercomputing facilities. The majority of our users is based at German universities, national research institutes, and the Research Centre itself, to a lesser extent they come from European institutes outside of Germany, from industry, and from European infrastructure projects like
DEISA and I3HP, in which our institute is actively involved. In recent years the European part of our user community has been steadily growing. Our recently launched initiative 
Strengthening Computational Science in Europe, which aims at establishing and advancing collaborations with scientists from the new EU member states, is a vivid example of our approach of linking external research projects to the Centre and of creating synergy effects between our own in-house research and that of our users.ParaTeam
Each of the more than 150 scientific projects currently being investigated on the Centre's supercomputers is assigned an advisor from our ParaTeam who, typically, is an experienced scientist in the respective research area. The ParaTeam is an interdisciplinary group of staff members from the divisions
Capability Computing and Visualisation, High-Performance Systems, Computer Simulations, and Mathematics. Team members spend an individual share of their manpower on high-level user support. Users requesting help with implementing, porting or optimizing their applications on our supercomputer systems are referred to their personal advisor who mostly has an own background in scientific computing, and who is backed by specialists in algorithms, parallel programming, programming languages, compilers, libraries, and tools.Training and Education
Besides direct user support another important task of our division is training and education in scientific computing. Each summer we run the
NIC guest student programme, which allows students to visit the Institute for ten weeks to work on a research project in collaboration with a personal advisor. An introduction to parallel programming, access to our supercomputers, and technical support from our computing staff is also provided as part of the programme. We also offer courses and workshops for current and prospective users of our HPC systems, providing introductory as well as in-depth information about the JUMP and JUGENE services and their usage.last change 16.03.2009 |
Boris Orth | Print