Retrospective of the NIC Symposium 2016

The John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) supports research projects from a broad scientific spectrum including topics from astrophysics, condensed matter and numerical mathematics. The NIC symposium is held biennially in February and provides an overview of the activities and results of projects which were allocated computing time on the supercomputers at Forschungszentrum Jülich by NIC. This year, the NIC symposium had a record number of 200 scientists who attended the conference and poster session.

The participants were welcomed by Forschungszentrum Jülich’s Chairman of the Board of Directors, Prof. Wolfgang Marquardt, and director of JSC and NIC, Prof. Thomas Lippert. Prof. Marquardt focused on big data and its significance in scientific simulation. He briefly discussed a selection of emerging key challenges. Prof. Lippert expanded on the challenges of scientific big data analytics in high-performance computing. He also provided an overview of the new general-purpose system JURECA, which has been greatly accepted by the users of the computer facilities at JSC.

Recent results and outcomes were presented in 14 insightful talks and in an overwhelming number of 120 posters. The symposium provided plenty of time for the exchange of ideas and experiences in an interdisciplinary scientific environment. All accompanying materials, including the proceedings, are available at http://www.john-von-neumann-institut.de/nic/nic-symposium-2016.
(Contact: Dr. Alexander Schnurpfeil, nic@fz-juelich.de)

JSC News, 18 March 2016