Commission for Informatics and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre
The Commission for Informatics is concerned with research in informatics. In particular, it operates the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich which has a staff of over 170 employees. Today, the LRZ is one of the most important technical and scientific computing centres in Europe. It acts as a scientific computing centre for the universities in the Munich area and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, provides a powerful communication infrastructure through the Munich Scientific Network (Münchner Wissenschaftsnetz – MWN) and is a competence centre for data communication networks. Furthermore it serves as a central site for archiving large amounts of data, and is a competence centre for technical and scientific supercomputing. The LRZ is a national supercomputing centre and part of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), which is made up of the three German national supercomputing centres (Garching, Jülich, and Stuttgart). The GCS is principal partner in PRACE, a project of the European Union preparing the creation of a persistent pan-European High Performance Computing environment.
In spring of 2006 the LRZ has moved to the newly built facilities on the research campus near Garching, north of Munich. Starting in autumn 2009 this building will again nearly be doubled. Not only does the next supercomputer, named SuperMUC, demand more space than the current system but also the extension of services offered by the LRZ to scientists in Munich and Bavaria. Furthermore the new building will host a "CAVE"-like infrastructure for scientific visualisation.
The LRZ not only provides the computer systems and their administration but also has a wide spectrum of application pro-grams and an extensive support and training service. Another aspect is negotiating educational discounts for software licenses. Just in the Munich area, the services of the LRZ are used by more than 95.000 students, 8.000 scientists and 14.000 other employees.
The LRZ carries out research in the field of applied informatics. It is particularly concerned with the prototypical use and management of innovative supply structures of data processing. Of central interest are concepts of integrated network and systems management and special aspects of middleware for Grid Computing. Together with KONWIHR the LRZ is involved in several computational sciences projects. Special emphasis is laid upon the efficient use of supercomputers, specifically with regard to algorithms and resource-usage. The LRZ is a member of the Munich Computational Science Centre, a collaboration of the Technische Universität München, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, and the Max Planck Society and its High Performance Computing Centre (RZG). Furthermore, the LRZ is actively involved in a number of Grid projects, for example the German D-Grid, DEISA, GEANT, and the Large Hadron Collider Grid.