In the Aachen Cluster of Excellence "Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries", a consortium of 18 institutes at RWTH Aachen University is working on the development of new techniques and concepts to increase the competitiveness of production technology in Germany.

In this interdisciplinary project, the VR Group of RWTH Aachen University is responsible for reducing the occupancy of real manufacturing capacities in process optimization by using virtual production systems, the acquisition of process data that is difficult to determine with the help of simulation approaches, the realistic virtual mapping of machine tools and coupling highly specialized simulation systems to capture interphysical effects. more

The aim of the 5G-Industry Campus Europe is to research and practically investigate the new 5G technology in the manufacturing industry. New applications and systems are being developed to further digitalize and network production. Edge-cloud systems will also be used to test the fastest possible data processing. The network of the 5G-Industry Campus covers an outdoor area of about one square kilometre and 7,000 square meters in the machine halls of the participating partners. The project partners will investigate various application scenarios there over the next three years. These different scenarios will focus, among other things, on 5G sensor technology for monitoring and controlling manufacturing processes, mobile robotics and logistics, and the development of cross-location production chains.

As a cooperation partner, the IT Center is responsible for the fiber optic connection of the various subnetworks, the operation of the 5G network and the outdoor antennas of the 5G Industry Campus. more

The Applying Interoperable Metadata Standards (AIMS) project aims to enable scientists to create, share and reuse metadata standards. Therefore, tools and workflows for the effortless creation of standardized metadata during research are being developed, which at the same time increase the efficiency of data processing. As an integral part, the created standards will be stored, indexed and made publicly available. By implementing a concept for adaptation, inheritance and versioning of the created metadata standards, the generation of backward compatible derivatives, which increase the reusability of the standards and accelerate collaboration, will be a process in which a standard develops to community-wide acceptance.

The IT Center is working on the project as a cooperation partner together with the WZL of the RWTH Aachen University, the Institute of Fluid System Technology and the University and State Library of the TU Darmstadt.

The project "Energy-Optimized Simulation Methods for Application-Oriented Computing Problems" - in short "ENSIMA" - is one of the nine third-party funded projects of the BMBF program for "Energy-Efficient HPC (GreenHPC)". The project started on October 1, 2022 and is funded for three years. In addition to RWTH Aachen University as coordinator, the project partners are TU Darmstadt, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Gesellschaft für numerische Simulation mbH, GNS Systems GmbH, SIMCON kunststofftechnische Software GmbH and Technische Hochschule Würzburg-Schweinfurt. All in all, the project involves partners from academia and industry.

The basic goal of the project is to use AI methods to improve the selection of design parameters in production processes and to accelerate the execution time of simulation processes through approximate and heterogeneous computing. Innovative solutions should reduce the number of finite element simulations required, which are used for many engineering problems, such as crash simulations. For the use case of sheet metal forming in the automotive industry, the project partners want to reduce the computation time by 50%, which should lead to a 15% reduction in the use of steel and thus indirectly to a reduction in both manufacturing-related emissions and the energy required for vehicle production.
More information can be found on the project website.

The HPC.NRW competence network offers an extensive range of diverse HPC infrastructures plus a number of thematic clusters for low-threshold training, consulting and coaching services. The aim is to make effective and efficient use of high-performance computing and storage facilities and to support scientific researchers of all levels, particularly researchers at the post-graduate and post-doctoral levels. Regular, intensive exchanges take place between the sites of the competence network on the service and support for HPC users in NRW, software and operation, as well as HPC usage. more

Within the Human Brain Project (HBP) started in October 2013, the Virtual Reality Group is leading a work package “Interactive Visualization, Analysis, and Control”. The work package is part of the HBP subproject “Interactive Supercomputing” headed by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and includes partners from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the Swiss Supercomputing Centre, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid. Furthermore, the KAUST University in Saudi Arabia will serve as an associate partner in this work package. more

In  the second phase of the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries” the Virtual Production Intelligence (VPI) platform is being developed. It is a holistic and integrative concept for the support of collaborative planning, monitoring and control of core processes within production and product development in various application fields. In the context of the VPI we are developing a tool for the explorative visualization of multi-dimensional meta-model data, which is based on the concept of hyperslices, linked with a 3D volume representation. The tool is applicable to various scenarios of multi-dimensional data analysis, but the concrete use case in the current project is to find ideal configuration parameters for laser cutting machines in the context of factory planning. more

While visual feedback is often the main focus in Virtual Environments, sound is another important modality. Auditory feedback can enhance the immersion and believability of virtual scenes. However, the common approach of using pre-recorded sound samples is often not feasible for highly interactive environments, because too many sounds would have to be recorded or designed upfront. Especially with physically simulated objects, a lot of sounds are generated by collisions between objects. The sound of such collisions depends on different factors: the material and shape of the objects, as well as the positions, strength and temporal distribution of the collision forces. Especially the latter aspects are difficult to reproduce with sound samples. more

In the current BMBF project IT-ZAUBER, RWTH Aachen University, TU Dresden and ROM-Technik GmbH & Co. KG, together with the associated partners Sachsen Energie AG and ICT Facilities GmbH, are developing a digital twin as a digital image of the data center that captures its properties, condition and behavior through models, information and data. The application possibilities as a digital tool for the planning and operation of data centers are to be demonstrated and evaluated exemplarily at the two HPC centers of the RWTH and the TUD. The digital twin will be aware of the condition and behavior of the IT infrastructure as well as the cooling system and its integration into the other supply structures and will be used for condition evaluations and target value determinations, thus going far beyond the state of current operating concepts. The project is one of nine collaborative research projects in the field of energy-efficient HPC (GreenHPC) with three years of funding from the BMBF (FKZ 16ME0614).

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

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

In NHR4CES (National High Performance Computing Center for Computational Engineering Science), RWTH Aachen University and Technical University Darmstadt join forces to combine their strengths in HPC applications, algorithms and methods, and the efficient use of HPC hardware. The goal is to create an ecosystem combining best practices of HPC and research data management to address questions that are of central importance for technical developments in economy and society. 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

The aim of this project is to gather European experts from very diverse fields, from computer sciences to anesthesiology, to bring an innovative tool in the hands of the medical doctors to perform safer regional anesthesia for the patient at reduced cost for the society. For that purpose, a virtual reality simulator and assistant will be developed, providing an innovative way for medical doctors to train extensively on virtual patients and to be assisted by additional patient-specific information during the procedure. The project started on 1st of November 2013 for three years, gathers experts from 10 European countries in a consortium of 14 academic, industrial and clinical partners. 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

This project aims at developing a specialized training system dedicated to the teaching of a major maxillofacial surgery procedure based on Virtual Reality technology. The medical procedure of interest, the bilateral sagittal split osteotomy (BSSO), allows the displacement of the lower jaw in all three spatial dimensions, e.g., to correct an under- or overbid. The procedure is performed via an intraoral approach and includes the creation of an osteotomy line in the mandible using a saw or a burr, followed by a controlled splitting of the bone by a reversed twisting of one or two chisels inserted into the line. more

The general idea of brain simulation is to reverse engineer the brain using large-scale simulations. To understand the relationships between structure and dynamics on multiple scales, ranging from microscopic circuits to networks at brain scale, forms a formidable challenge in neuroscience and produces a large amount of data. This data has to be analyzed in a timely fashion to understand the simulated model and extract insight about its functioning at the aforementioned scales. more