FAU CSC

FAU CSC shall renews and extends the scope of the former Zentralinstitut für Scientific Computing (ZISC). The ZISC was founded within the research area A3 Multiscale-Modeling & Simulation of the Cluster of Excellence Engineering of Advanced Materials (EAM). The mission of FAU CSC is to bundle and represent competences across faculties in scientific computing, act as platform for interdisciplinary scientific exchange and cooperation, host, administrate and support interdisciplinary research programs/ partnerships (CRCs, RTGs, …), as well as to establish and coordinate industry contacts and projects. These functions have been successfully realized. To name prominent examples, FAU CSC is hosting its own DFG research training group RTG2423 Fracture across Scales; coordinating the theory, simulation and optimization activities in the CRC1411 Design of Particulate Products and maintaining the Procter & Gamble SimCenter.

All these highly relevant activities will also be maintained by FAU CSC. However, there are several reasons why the structure and the focus should be extended, when transforming ZISC into FAU CSC. These reasons are

  • a strong drift in the worldwide research landscape towards data sciences; a prominent example of this is the Bavarian HTA program, resulting in a significant number of new professorships and even departments at FAU in this area (among them AIBE, CSCS and DDS),
  • a drastic change in the landscape of research data management and software sustainability; prominent
    examples are the INF projects in coordinated DFG research programs and the national research data
    infrastructure (NFDI) installed by the GWK,
  • NHR@FAU shall establish a national high-performance computing center (as part of the German NHR
    network) which provides Tier-2 compute capacities and internationally recognized competences in
    HPC and scientific computing to Germany’s research community.

FAU CSC will support the FAU in mastering these new challenges and in joining forces for new areas of
research. In particular, FAU CSC will

  •  tighten and strengthen the interaction between algorithms, software and HPC expertise at FAU and further develop those topics. FAU CSC will not only provide a platform for FAU’s users of all NHR centers but will extend FAU’s scope within the NHR network by adding new fields of expertise in future-driven applications. Thus, FAU CSC will enable adequate, state-of-the art support beyond HPC techniques for FAU researchers to make best use of HPC resources in Germany and Europe,
  • offer support in data science related topics, such as research data management in scientific computing (hand in hand with the CDI; FAU CSC is coordinating the RDM activities in CRC814, CRC1411 and RTG2423), modern data analytics, data driven modeling and the connection of data science and HPC,
  • maintain its traditionally strong capabilities in Modeling and Simulation (e.g. RTG2423, CRC1411 ….) and apply these to new research fields (e.g. Digital Humanities).