NEWSFLASHES
Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Celebrates Its 60th Anniversary
Newsflash 03/2022 –
LRZ Director Prof. Dieter Kranzlmüller and Bavarian Minister for Science and Art Markus Blume unbox the Cerebras WSE-2—the largest computer chip ever built—during LRZ’s 60th anniversary celebration. Image credit: Axel König, StMWK
On Thursday, July 14, leadership at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) welcomed government officials, staff, and researchers past and present to celebrate the centre’s 60th anniversary. The Bavarian State Minister for Science and the Arts, Markus Blume, and President for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW) Thomas O. Höllmann were among those in attendance.
The centre has gone through several transitions during that 60-year period, beginning as an IT service provider for the two large Munich universities—the Technical University of Munich and Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität München—in 1962 before adding high-performance computing (HPC) to its repertoire in the 1990s. The centre moved to its current home on a research campus in Garching near Munich in 2006, and became one of the 3 national high-performance computing centres comprising the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing in 2007.
Throughout that period, the centre has continually looked for opportunities to expand its offerings to researchers across Germany and Europe and remain at the cutting edge of computer science and information technology research. “The extraordinary development of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities is based on a close interaction of a broad spectrum of basic research and application-oriented implementation,” said Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities President Thomas O. Höllmann. “In terms of its innovative capacity, LRZ is actually a permanent start-up that is always on the cutting edge and proves that creativity and efficiency need not diminish over the course of sixty years, but - quite the opposite - can even increase.”
The full-day event included panel discussions with the LRZ Board of Directors, presentations on current research projects running on LRZ resources, and demonstrations connected to emerging technologies in the realms of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
For a full report on the day’s event, please read the original LRZ press release.