Astrophysical Supercomputing with “ Green ” GPU

its tenth year and this is a good reason to look back a little bit. When the three national centers decided to launch Inside in 2002 this was a first step to bring together the activities of the centers and make them visible to a broader audience. Since then German supercomputing has undergone a number of major developments and has made great leaps forward. As a first step a national super-computing strategy was developed. Following from this, the Gauss Center for Supercomputing (GCS) as the coordinating body for the three national centers was established. The Gauss Alliance followed to bring together the regional and topical German centers. For the national centers a project " PetaGCS " was started providing 400 Mio Euro for hardware and operational costs to guarantee Germany a leading position in supercomputing in Europe and worldwide. For the mid-range centers a special line of funding was opened which provided 100 Mio Euro for the renewal of systems. All this funding for hardware was supported by strategies for the development of new algorithms and software. The Federal Ministry for Education and Science (BMBF) started a special HPC software funding line. Through this initiative Germany has seen two calls for proposals in HPC software over the last 3 years. While BMBF was focusing its funding on application driven projects the German Research Foundation (DFG) initiated a special program for the funding of basic technologies targeting highly scalable software for supercomputing. The projects funded in this initiative will start later this year. In this issue you will find reports and articles about some of the achievements of these combined hardware and software initiatives. HLRS at Stuttgart inaugurated its first Petascale system. LRZ at Garching is about to launch its 3 Petaflops system with an inauguration in July of this year. A number of application reports show the usage of GCS-systems. Project reports highlight the German research activities in software development. Obviously German supercomputing has made big steps forward over the last year. However, we do not only look back on our successes. The next steps for supercomputing in Germany are in the pipeline already. GCS will start the next round of hardware upgrades soon with the Juelich Supercomputing Center installing a new BlueGene system late this year. LRZ and HLRS will follow in 2013 and 2014. Discussions about the continuation of GCS beyond 2017 have already started. The funding for …