HPC Funding by the German Ministry of Research

Munich 04 April 2003 Ministerialrat Bernd Reuse, Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), gave at ISC 2002 in Heidelberg an overview of the actual funding activities of BMBF in this field. Here, a reprint from the article from Primeur Live in a shortened version.

In 2002 a new round of IT Programmes are 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

HPC is integrated in the Software Systems, Software Engineering, Human / Technology Interaction, Intelligent Systems, Knowledge Processing, Bioanalogous Information Processing, and HPC: Supercomputing and Grid Computing.

In the HPC arena, Bernd Reuse presented the main 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. Competence centres are installed at the big German supercomputer centres. This seems new, but I supported in 1984 at RRZN in Hanover the Lower Saxonian users of the Cray 1M at Konrad Zuse Institute (ZIB) in Berlin. These were not only advisory services in command language but also contained optimisation, vectorisation and new numerical algorithms.

BMBF funded in the time frame from 1993 to 1998 about 23 projects, from 1997 to 2001 it was reduced to about 12. In 2002 Dr. Reuse did not disclose the figures and the amount of money for Software systems and the details of the separated 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 total IT research BMBF funds in 2002 with the total sum of 644,7 Mio. Euro. Thus HPC sums up to 0,62 % of that IT funding.

In 2003 HPC funding is 4 Mio. Euro too, in 2004 to 2005 5,0 Mio Euro. In that time frame the total of Software Systems is 55,7 Mio. Euro.

Thus Germany is just installing big systems, but the funding for HPC projects seems not innovative and very small. This contrasts totally to the news from the USA, where they start a Task Force. The High End Computing Revitalisation Task Force will guide investments in hardware and research in better software for HPC.

http://www.itrd.gov/hecrtf-outreach/fv

Uwe Harms

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