Cooperations and Memberships

AICES represents a new doctoral program under the auspices of the Excellence Initiative of the German state and federal governments. RWTH Aachen University - one of the leading technical universities in Europe - has been establishing educational structures to meet the future research challenges in computational engineering science (CES). AICES is spearheaded by 15 RWTH institutes from 4 departments, and it includes participation from Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf. The VR Group at the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University develops innovative methods of interactive visualization in order to establish an intuitive analysis of the conducted simulations within the scope of the AICES projects. more

The IT support of all central areas of the student life cycle of the RWTH will in future be based on the integrated software CAMPUSonline of Graz University of Technology. In Aachen, the Austrian system operates under the name RWTHonline. The continuous expansion of communication with the universities and colleges that use CAMPUSonline as their administration and information system is carried out in the so-called CAMPUSonline user group. It serves as an exchange platform and to represent the needs of all universities using CAMPUSonline. Here the further roadmap of the product and other current topics are also discussed in workshops. more

The Lernplattform Management (LPM) department within the Center für Lehr- und Lernservices (CLS) is one of the e-learning service centers of RWTH Aachen University and an integral part of the university's e-learning strategy. It advises and supports participants in all questions concerning the use of e-learning in organization, administration, study and teaching. CLS provides with the LPM department training and consulting services to support lecturers in particular in the development and implementation of modern, student-focused and didactically high-quality blended learning events that combine classic classroom teaching with concepts of media-supported teaching. The aim is to promote active, self-determined learning by students.

The central element of the CLS respectively LPM services is the university-wide teaching and learning platform RWTHmoodle. Its online learning rooms provide teachers with the necessary blended learning infrastructure. The platform is (further) developed and operated in cooperation with the university's IT Center and integrated into the central IT processes of university teaching. more

The central university administration (ZHV) is responsible for the areas of planning, administration and legal affairs at the university. The ZHV sees itself as a service provider for students, departments and university institutions, as well as externally for business, industry, local authorities, associations and students. The services it offers are correspondingly diverse.
The IT Center cooperates with the ZHV in areas such as teaching, room management, procurement and quality management, but also generally in joint IT projects. Particularly worthy of mention here is the area of campus management and the PuL project.

DINI, the German Iniative for Network Information, was established to improve information and communication services and the underlying information technology infrastructures at higher education and research institutions.

The dialog and exchange between the involved IT departments initiated by DINI is to help improve the IT services at the individual institutions. more

EUNIS brings together the people responsible for the management, development and policy of information technology in higher education in Europe. The aim of EUNIS is to contribute to the development of high quality information systems. This is to be achieved primarily through exchanges and cooperation between those responsible for information systems in higher education or in research institutes/organisations in Europe. In addition, establishing and strengthening relations with supervisory organisations responsible for information systems in higher education and research institutes in each country and at European level plays an important role in this context. Thus, various activities and events, a network of contacts and information and the organisation of the annual EUNIS conference are part of EUNIS' repertoire. RWTH Aachen University has been a member of EUNIS since 2018 and is also regularly successfully represented at the conferences by employees of the IT Center. more

Two years after the Gauss-Centre has been created to coordinate the European supercomputing activities, Germany took the next step to shape the future of high performance computing (HPC) on a national level. On December 3, 2008 the nations leading supercomputing centers met in Bonn to create the Gauß-Allianz. While the Gauss-Centre was successfully addressing the needs on the top end, it was clear from the beginning that an additional layer of support was required to maintain the longevity with a network of competence centers across whole Germany. This gap is now addressed by the Gauß-Allianz, where regional and topical centers team up to create the necessary infrastructure. Further information can be found on the website. 

The competence center focuses on computer vision and imaging research and development – a key technology forming the basis for numerous innovative technological developments and applications. Since research in the area of “imaging & vision” is conducted in many disciplines with varying methods and approaches, the center aims to create a holistic network of the individuals and their activities in the various fields to optimize the exchange between them.This field of research combines elements from imaging, signal and information processing, artificial intelligence, and actuator engineering. more

The Jülich Aachen Research Alliance (JARA), 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.

The JARA Center for Simulation and Data Science (JARA CSD) provides a platform for scientific exchange that brings together researchers from mathematics and computer science to engineering and the natural sciences. The overarching scientific challenge is to combine data-driven and physics-based computational approaches into explainable and reliable solutions for analysis and prediction. JARA CSD advances research software engineering and provides a corresponding forum for the exchange of knowledge and research-oriented training across all career levels. JARA CSD thus acts as an incubator for interinstitutional and interdisciplinary collaborations and projects, fosters scientific excellence and provides a hub for innovation. The center provides and utilizes high-performance computational infrastructure, including next-generation computing. Further information can be found on the website. 

The Moodle learning platform is an open source software project that has grown since 2002 under the leadership of Moodle Pty Ltd. and is used in hundreds of thousands of institutions and workplaces worldwide. The Moodle Users Association is an official non-profit organization dedicated to the development of Moodle. In the course of the transition from L²P to the new RWTH learning platform RWTHmoodle in 2019, RWTH Aachen University has also become a Gold Member of the Moodle Users Association. This membership offers the university the opportunity not only to further develop its own platform but also to contribute significantly to the development of Moodle in general. In addition, the university supports the non-profit organization in the development of plugins for the learning platform. more

The MPI Forum is the standards committee that develops the Message Passing Interface (MPI). Message passing is a proven method for programming distributed memory computer systems, and MPI is the de facto standard for message passing in high-performance computing (HPC). In addition to interfaces for communication and parallel IO, MPI also provides an interface for application development tools (performance and correctness analysis) that help application developers to develop correct and efficient HPC applications.

The HPC group develops such tools itself and is actively involved in the further development of this interface in the MPI Forum working group for "Tool Interfaces". The synergies from this work directly benefit the applications and developers.

Pooling resources and competencies of university-based high-performance computing and advancing research: this is what the NHR Alliance stands for. The Alliance coordinates the supraregional, sustainable and resource-efficient use of computing capacity and expertise. The big plus for national researchers: They can access resources nationwide and as needed, regardless of their location! The collaboration promotes knowledge exchange and interdisciplinary cooperation.

The IT Center is one of nine high-performance computing centers that are members of the association, which was founded in 2021. Together with TU Darmstadt, RWTH forms the National High Performance Computing Center for Computational Engineering Science (NHR4CES). Within the framework of NHR4CES, RWTH offers scientists from German universities resources on its high-performance computers free of charge. Equally important components of the NHR concept are the services offered by the centers: Strengthening the methodological competence of scientists from a wide range of application areas, providing training and continuing education in high-performance computing, expanding new competencies, and thus ensuring the long-term performance of scientific computing in Germany.

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. 
Details can be found on the OpenMP website.

Regina is an independent network for experts and actors in the field of information and communication technology. Its members from business, academia and research provide a forum for information and exchange in the field. more

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. Further information can be found on the SPEC website. 

ZKI, the Centers for Communication and Information Processing in Teaching and Research, support IT providers at national and international educational and research institutions by facilitating information exchange, initiating collaboration between IT departments, and providing assistance and advice. more (de)