The three GCS centres – High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich, (LRZ) – have started an initiative that aims to expand the existing close cooperation of the three national high-performance computing (HPC) sites. The InHPC-DE project aims to unite the three national HPC centres into one integrated national HPC ecosystem, in turn creating the foundation of a homogeneous yet distributed HPC concept for Germany’s Tier-1 computing facilities and technologies as well as its world-class HPC services and support.

At the heart of this initiative is a high-speed 100 Gbit/s network, based on DFN’s X-WiN and BelWü, to interlink the three centres nationwide, enabling an easy and fast, cross-organizational transfer of the massive amounts of data resulting from the large-scale computing runs. This extremely fast network will support distributed workflows, including post processing, and allow for collaborative, remote visualization. Equally important will be the implementation of a distributed yet integrated data management system spread across the three centres.

By fostering a tighter technical integration of the GCS centres, InHPC-DE will complement the ongoing SiVeGCS project, which is mainly focused on the provision of national (Tier-1) and European (Tier-0) HPC services.