Hpc-landschaft in deutschland: Infrastruktur, betrieb und politisches

The overall scientific challenge for most areas of science is to master the presence of massive parallelism and, with its help, to allow high-end applications to benefit from the high-performance computing (HPC) technology available today. Many key issues need to be addressed, ranging from parallel programming paradigms, via dynamic load distribution, to energy-Awareness, and scalability of algorithms and applications, to name just a few. This paper gives an overview of the HPC landscape in Germany. With the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) and the Gauss Alliance (GA), the structure of the German HPC centres offers users from all scientific areas access to HPC resources at all potentially required levels of performance. However, the significant contribution of these centres-beyond providing the hardware infrastructure-is to push software technology on all required key issues mentioned above, to make the access to HPC hardware resources efficient. In spite of the reasonable hardware funding of the GCS and GA HPC centres, the critical issue of finding the right "brains"to program the "racks"still continues to remain open.