NEWSFLASHES

BERLIN, Germany, April 16, 2021—The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) is proud to announce that as of April 8, 2021, Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) is the new Chairman of the GCS Board of Directors.

Lippert succeeds Prof. Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller, Director of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ). In addition to his GCS position and having led JSC and its predecessor organization for 17 years, Lippert also serves as the Chair of Modular Supercomputing and Quantum Computing at Goethe University Frankfurt.

As GCS continues to expand its capabilities and resources to leverage emerging and disruptive technologies, I look forward to serving as chairman of the board," said Lippert. "Together with my vice chairs and colleagues Michael Resch and Dieter Kranzlmüller in Stuttgart and Garching, I look forward to further strengthening Germany's position as an international leader in both traditional high-performance computing and quantum computing, artificial intelligence workflows and modular supercomputing, among other exciting advances at the forefront of computing technologies.

GCS unites the three major German supercomputing centres—the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre—into a single entity aimed at delivering complementary system architectures and expertise to scientists and engineers across Europe. GCS consistently maintains three of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.

Lippert takes over right after JSC finished installing its JUWELS Booster module, a GPU-accelerated component of JSC’s modular supercomputer, JUWELS. The JUWELS Cluster and Booster modules together are capable of 85 petaflops, or 85 quadrillion calculations per second, making it the fastest supercomputer in Europe and one of the most energy efficient in the world.

“Over the next two years, GCS will not only remain committed to offering European researchers access to world-leading traditional HPC systems, but also ensure that we are listening to our users’ needs and expanding our repertoire of resources, training and education offerings, and access policies to assist European industries and governments in any way we can,” said Dr. Claus-Axel Müller, Managing Director of GCS.

About GCS: The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three German national supercomputing centres HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) into Germany’s integrated Tier-0 supercomputing institution. Together, the three centres provide the largest, most powerful supercomputing infrastructure in all of Europe to serve a wide range of academic and industrial research activities in various disciplines. They also provide top-tier training and education for the national as well as the European High Performance Computing (HPC) community. GCS is the German member of PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), an international non-profit association consisting of 24 member countries, whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.

GCS is jointly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the federal states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, and North Rhine-Westphalia. It is headquartered in Berlin, Germany.