VI-HPS spokesman Felix Wolf from Forschungszentrum Juelich is excited about the synergies created through this partnership: "The integration of leading tool projects will provide a clear productivity benefit for the HPC user community." And Christian Bischof (Aachen), deputy spokesman of the collaboration, explained: "Besides enhancing the technical capabilities of the VI-HPS tool suite, a major focus will also be convincing more users that using these tools can save them time both during development and when the application goes into production."

VI-HPS is a joint institute founded by Forschungszentrum Juelich, RWTH Aachen University, Technische Universitaet Dresden, and the University of Tennessee. The goal of the partnership is to improve the quality and accelerate the development process of complex simulation codes in science and engineering that are being designed for the most advanced parallel computer systems. The four institutions will develop integrated state-of-the-art programming tools for high-performance computing that assist programmers in diagnosing programming errors and optimizing the performance of their applications.

The virtual institute is being inaugurated with a half-day colloquium held at Forschungszentrum Juelich. The keynote talk with the title "The Opportunities and Challenges of Computational Science and Engineering" is given by Douglass Post, Chief Scientist of the United States Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Programme (HPCMP).

Virtual institutes are a well-established funding instrument of the Helmholtz Association. Helmholtz centres and universities use this instrument to concentrate research capacities and thereby create centres of excellence of international standing in key areas of research. Virtual institutes are supplemented with an annual budget of 300 K euro for three years.