The Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance, JARA for short, a cooperation between RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, provides a top-level research environment that is in the top international league and is attractive to the brightest researchers worldwide. In five sections, JARA conducts research  in Translational Brain Medicine , Nuclear and Particle Physics , Future Information Technologies, High-Performance Computing, and Sustainable Energy.

The RWTH Aachen IT Center provides support to the JARA-HPC section, which first and foremost aims to contribute to making full use of the opportunities offered by high-performance computers and computer simulations to address current research issues. Furthermore, it seeks to provide a joint infrastructure for research and teaching in the fields of high-performance computing and visualization.  more

NFDI4Ing focuses on the creation of necessary infrastructures for the engineering sciences and the further development of the disciplines process analysis and description, research data publication and citation as a criteria of scientific reputation. Formalized qualification and training concepts for scientific personnel and experts in the infrastructure facilities are also offered. 
The FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles for the recording and re-use of research data, most of which are already internationally accepted, are developed in a discipline-conform way.

In addition, the focus is on the appropriate networking and coordination of the various stakeholders, representatives of the respective disciplines and research data infrastructures.
Among other things, the consortium deals with cross-sectional topics in the engineering sciences and acts as a reliable partner in the NFDI. The tasks arising from the cross-sectional topics are solved in close cooperation with other consortia.

The consortium is headed by Prof. Robert Schmitt from RWTH Aachen University. The head office is located at the IT Center and at the TU Darmstadt. more

The National Research Data Infrastructure for Chemistry, NFDI4Chem, represents all scientific disciplines in chemistry. 

The vision of NFDI4Chem is to digitize all major steps in chemical research to support scientific personnel in the collection, storage, processing, analysis, disclosure and reuse of research data.

The consortium is headed by the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. Prof. Sonja Herres-Pawlis from RWTH Aachen University acts as co-spokesperson, the IT Center is a participant. more

Since 1998 the High Performance Comuting Team of the Center for Computing and Communication of the RWTH Aachen University is engaged in the topic of Shared-Memory-Parallelisierung with OpenMP. OpenMP is productively used on the currently largest Shared- Memory Computers of the Center for Computing and Communication with up to 1024 processor cores. OpenMP meanwhile supports also heterogeneous computers as well as vectorization. more

Using performance analysis tools and optimizing code for HPC architectures is a cumbersome task which often requires in depth expert knowledge in HPC. Because of current trends of computing architectures to use accelerators, more cores and deeper memory hierarchies, this complexity is going to increase further in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the POP (Performance, Optimization and Productivity) project offers services in performance analysis and performance optimization to code developers in industry and academia to connect code developers and HPC experts. This shall allow to integrate performance optimization in the software development process of HPC applications. The POP project gathers experts from the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC), the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), the Numerical Algebra Group (NAG), TERATEC und the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University.

POP is one of the eight Centers of Excellence in HPC that have been promoted by the European Commission within Horizon 2020.

Further information on the project and how you can engage the services of POP can be found here.

Since 2013, the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University is part of SPEC and actively engaged in its High Performance Group (HPG). SPEC’s HPG is a forum for discussing and developing benchmark methodologies for High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. At the same time, the group releases production quality benchmark suites like SPEC MPI2007, SPEC OMP2012, and SPEC ACCEL, that can evaluate all dimensions of parallelism. These benchmark suites are used in academia and industry to conduct research in HPC systems, facilitate procurement, testing, and tuning of HPC systems. more

High-performance clusters often provide multiple MPI libraries and compiler suites for parallel programming. This means that parallel programming tools which often depend on a specific MPI library, and sometimes on a specific compiler, need to be installed multiple times, once for each combination of MPI library and compiler which has to be supported. In addition, over time, newer versions of the tools also get released and installed. One way to manage many different versions of software packages, used by many computing centers all over the world, is the "module" software. However, each center provides a different set of tools, has a different policy on how and where to install different software packages, and how to name the different versions. UNITE tries to improve this situation for debugging and performance tools. more

©Vi-HPS

Sponsored by the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers the Virtual Institute - High Productivity Supercomputing (VI-HPS) aims at improving the quality and accelerate the development process of complex simulation programs in science and engineering that are being designed for the most advanced parallel computer systems. The IT Center of the RWTH Aachen University is focussed on improving the usability of the state-of-the-art programming tools for high-performance computing developped by the partner institutions. more