High Performance Scientific Computing Support by the BMBF

Now a new round of IT Programmes is opened. In the time frame 2002 to 2006 the research areas will be:

1. Nanoelectronics and Systems
2. Basic Technologies for Communication
3. Internet Basics and Services
4. Software Systems

He gave some examples concerning these topics:

1. Technologies and devices for electronics production, lithography processes for structure size of 50 nm and below and third dimension of integration
2. Photonic communication networks increase the capacity of transmission to 50 Tbit/s per fibre, and mobile broadband communication systems
3. Middleware and protocols for the Internet, the mobile Internet and new communication standards
4. Software Engineering, Human/Technology Interaction, Intelligent Systems, Knowledge Processing, Bioanalogous Information Processing, and HPC: Supercomputing and Grid Computing

He described the different research topics in the Software Systems field. In the HPC arena he disclosed the R&D topics:

• Data management
• Efficient management methods between elements of supercomputers
• New high-performance parallel data-mining procedures in large databases of texts, images, patterns and web sites
• Parallel methods of non-numerics
• Reusable parallel libraries with optimising algorithms
• Combination of numeric simulation with non-numeric methods
• Competence centres, competence networks

All these topics, except the commercial side, are not new. The competence centres are installed at the big German supercomputer centres.

Last year, he presented the HPC funding supported in the time frame of 1993 to 1998 including about 23 projects, from 1997 to 2001 about 12. This year he did not disclose the figures and the amount of money for Software Systems and the details of the seperated projects. In 2001, the total was 48.5 Mio. Euro, 2,7 Mio. Euro for HPC, about 6%. In 2002, there is an increase of 50% in HPC to 4 Mio. Euro, 8%, of the Software Systems which is 50 Mio. Euro. Reuse presented a slide with the IT research, BMBF Funds in 2002, here the total sum is 644.7 Mio. Euro. Thus HPC is .62% of that IT funding.

In 2003, HPC funding is 4 Mio. Euro, in 2004 to 2005 5.0 Mio Euro. In that time frame, the total of Software Systems is 55.7 Mio. Euro.

Last year, he mentioned that the funds for HPC by BMBF and Länder in 2001 concerning the procurement of supercomputers at Universities (Stuttgart, Munich, Hannover/Berlin) is about 23 Mio. Euro, and for the supercomputers at the research centres (Jülich, Hamburg, Garching) is about 16 Mio. Euro.

Thus Germany is just installing big systems, but the funding for HPC projects seems not innovative and very small.