High Performance Computing

 

The IT Center operates one of the fastest supercomputers in Germany. The High-Performance Computing Group supports users at RWTH Aachen and in the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia in the use of these high-performance computers.

 

RWTH Aachen University is one of the national HPC centers (NHR) since 2021. RWTH Aachen University and the TU Darmstadt are together forming NHR4CES to cooperate in the context of NHR. The IT Center operates high performance computers in order to support researchers from all German universities including institutions from RWTH Aachen University. The HPC systems are also open for RWTH students as part of their studies.

The High Performance Computing (HPC) group provides methodological support for the efficient use of these central high-performance computing facilities.

The HPC group offers user support for serial and parallel programming, troubleshooting, correctness analysis, runtime analysis and tuning, especially in the programming languages Fortran, C, C++, Java, and MatLab. Particular focus is placed on parallelization with message passing through MPI and multithreading, especially with OpenMP.

These topics are also treated in tutorials and workshops as part of our training offerings for users.

In its research activities, the HPC group is engaged with methods, tools and productivity of parallel programming, placing particular emphasis on performance and correctness analysis.

In this context, the group is actively driving the further development of the OpenMP specification in an international committee.

The Chair of Computer Science 12 – High Performance Computing teaches these topics to university students and supervises final theses in the area of high-performance computing.

The MUST software package for automatic correctness checking of parallel programs is continuously being further developed.