ICT infrastructure is becoming more and more important for universities in general. And those in NRW are no exception. A focus in NRW is simulation. Bischof sees growing demand for software and training in simulation. Also new university computing services, for instance e-learning, can benefit from it, leading to a faster adoption and re-use of experience. Hence the synergy amongst the NRW must be exploited, Bischof says.

One of the results of the cooperation is collective licenses for software, like Tivoli, BMC, and NAG.

The universities have a considerable power installed:

• Aachen: a 1.792 CPU Sun system with 4,6 Tflop/s peak;
• Dortmund: in the acquisition process for a new large cluster;
• Wuppertal: ALICEnext cluster with 3,7 Tflop/s peak and 1.024 Opeteron processors;
• Cologne: a 256 processor Opteron cluster, a 24 processor SGI Altix, and a SunFire SF6800
• Paderborn: a new VIScluster hpcLine, with 2,6 Tflop/s peak

These are the universities only. In NRW, for instance, there are other large machines in the Juelich resource centre located near Aachen.

The use of the HPC systems in Aachen is still dominated by traditional HPC users: mathematics, physics, and construction engineering, which makes sense as Aachen is a technical university.

The centre of Bischof offers a state-wide archiving system - Landesarchivserver - with a capacity of 500 Tbyte, and a disk cache of 30 Tbyte. Aachen has a mirror service with the Research Centre Juelich, using a dedicated glass fiber link.

Another state-wide project is the NRW-Grid. It links Linux/Unix based workstations at the Universities of Aachen and Cologne into a cycle-harvesting Grid that can be used by university users. The system uses Condor for job management. Applications include rendering, crystallography, and the Gaussian chemistry code.

In Grids, Bischof said, the most important issue is Grid competence sharing. This is even more important than Grid resources sharing itself. There must be a willingness to help Grid users from other universities too. Bischof stresses that if you put fragmented uncoordinated resources together, you do not get a usable Grid.

Another application that is becoming more and more important as users are logging in to lots of systems, including at other universities, is identity management. NRW is using IBM's Tivoli to manage some 145.000 accounts.

The Ressourcenverbund NRW has a web site in German at

http://www.rv-nrw.de/</a>