HLRN

The North German Supercomputing Alliance (Norddeutscher Verbund für Hoch- und Höchstleistungsrechnen - HLRN) was founded in 2001 by the merger of the six federal states of Berlin, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. In 2012 Brandenburg has joined the HLRN. The HLRN network is part of the national HPC infrastructure and jointly operates a distributed supercomputer system located in two operating centres University of Göttingen and Zuse Institute Berlin. The Göttingen site is operated by the GWDG.

Currently, the GWDG operates the first phase of the HLRN-IV, which will be extended by a second phase in Q2 2020. In the second phase, a modular data centre will be set up and the HPC team is involved in the planning. Details of the HLRN-IV system can be found on the HLRN web pages.

The HLRN systems are used in particular by scientists at universities and institutions in the participating federal states, but are also available to researchers outside the federal states network. Depending on the institutes affiliation, different user fees apply. Generally, computing time on the HLRN systems is allocated within the framework of large-scale projects. For a major project an application must be submitted, which is reviewed by the Scientific Commitee and -in the best case- approved. For the preparation of this application, individual user accounts with limited computing resources can be applied for. Further information can be found on the pages of the HLRN.

One of the outstanding aspects of the HLRN is the supra-regional, interdisciplinary operating competence network, which supports users during the whole process of the project application, project lifetime, as well as project extension. The competence network consists of experts from different application areas of scientific computing. The GWDG has one local expert advisor as the first point of contact for users on site and seven expert advisors from various fields.