Virtual Regional Organization

The virtual Hamburg HPC Competence Center (HHCC) was established as an essential part of the PeCoH (Performance Conscious High Performance Computing) project. The major focus of PeCoH lies on raising the user awareness for performance engineering to achieve further speedups for parallel applications with efficient utilization of the HPC resources. HHCC acts as a central contact point for HPC users of the three Hamburg regional compute centers involved (DKRZ, RRZ, and TUHH RZ) and is used to coordinate and intensify the collaboration between these institutions.

Partners

German Climate Computing Center / Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ)

DKRZ has long been devoted one of its departments to user consultancy. They support DKRZ’s users in the effective use of its systems by providing general personal advice on the use of the systems, helping users to port applications to the HPC systems, and by offering conceptual guidance on parallelization and optimization strategies for user code, specifically with respect to the provided HPC system.

Regional Computing Center / Regionales Rechenzentrum der Universität Hamburg (RRZ)

The HPC team at RRZ operates a 396 node Linux cluster and more than 2 PByte of disk storage. The team is part of the consulting network of the North German Supercomputing Alliance (Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum Nord (HLRN) in German). HPC activities (locally and for HLRN) include user support, user education (in parallel programming and single-processor optimization) and benchmarking. RRZ maintains and further develops BQCD (Berlin quantum chromodynamics program) as one of the HLRN application benchmark codes: BQCD (Download) (see also M. Allalen, M. Brehm, and H. Stüben. Performance of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) Simulations on the SGI Altix. Computational Methods in Science and Technology, 14(2):69–75, 2008).

Computer Center of Hamburg University of Technology / RZ der Technischen Universität Hamburg (TUHH RZ)

The TUHH RZ has HPC consultants to support local users as well as users of the North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN). TUHH RZ operates a 244 nodes Linux cluster. TUHH RZ and RRZ cooperate in sharing specialized parts of their HPC hardware.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grants LU 1353/12-1, OL 241/2-1, and RI 1068/7-1.