Data centres operating in Germany currently consume around 3 % of the total electricity produced and are responsible for CO₂ emissions of just over 8 million tonnes per year. As a result, even small energy savings ultimately lead to significant reductions in the total energy consumption of data centres and thus to relevant savings in CO₂. The aim of the funding track "GreenHPC" by Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is to improve the energy efficiency of high-performance computing, both of high-performance computing centres at universities and research institutions and of commercial computing centres.

The ENSIMA project will use AI methods to improve the determination of design parameters and accelerate the execution time of simulation processes through approximate and heterogeneous computing. For the sample use case – sheet metal forming in the automotive industry – the goal is to reduce computing time by 50 %, leading to a 15 % reduction in steel usage and thus indirectly to a reduction in both manufacturing-related emissions and energy requirements for vehicle production. Forschungszentrum Jülich will lead work package 2 (“Optimization of Workflow Components”), which will analyse and improve the performance and energy efficiency of the OpenForm user code components used in the project, which is supplied by industry partner GNS. Further project partners are RWTH Aachen University (coordinator) and TU Darmstadt.