The visit to the University of Stuttgart was carried out on the 17th and 18th of October, 2016. The High Performance Computing Center of Stuttgart University (HLRS) is Germany's first national HPC centre, established in 1996. In addition to being the home of Cray XC40 "Hazel Hen", the world's #9 machine (185,088 cores, Intel Xeon CPU E5-2680s, 7420 TFlops, ~10 PB of disk), there is also a 64 nodes Cray Urika-GX, A 64-node NEC SX-ACE system for vector processing, and the 751 node Laki and Laki 2 heterogeneous NEC systems. Another enticing feature of the CSC is the visualisation and augmented reality studio and the remains of a Cray-II in the coffee lounge!

The HLRS also has a Department of Philosophy of Science & Technology of Computer Simulation. It is an interdisciplinary research group of postgraduates in philosophy and scientific disciplines who are concerned with the human relationship with computer simulations especially with regard to policy, trust, and expectations. Special research topics include social perceptions of nonsyndromic craniosynostosis and the transformation of physics and mathematics by computer simulation.

The HLRS has an extensive programme in education and training for high performance computing; this includes Fortran, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Linear Solvers and Parallelisation, Optimization Workshops, and a week-long course in parallel programming taught be a leading member of the MPI forum, Rolf Rabenseifner. The visit to the HLRS coincided with the third day of an advanced MPI course covering hybrid MPI and OpenMP parallel programming in C and Fortran.

Special thanks are given to the members of the various European facilities who took their time to accommodate my visit and provide tours of their facilities. This includes (my deepest apologies for names I've overlooked!): Andreas Kaminski, Alena Wackerbarth, Nico Formanek, Michael Herrmann, Bastian Koller, Rolf Rabenseifner, Ludger Benighaus, Jutta Oexle, Martin Bernreuther, Heinz Pöhlmann, Thomas Beisel, and Bernd Krischok at the HLRS Stuttgart University.

Originally posted at: http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/researchplatforms/2017/01/30/university-of-s...