bwForCluster NEMO and bwForCluster BinAC inauguration

On July 14th, the inauguration ceremony for the bwForCluster BinAC (Tübingen) and bwForCluster NEMO (Freiburg) was held at the Rechenzentrum in Freiburg. During the press conference, questions were answered by representatives of the two universities and the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg. Additionally, two workgroup leaders from NEMO's scientific communities, Prof. Dr. Markus Schumacher (Physics) and Prof. Dr. Stefan Rotter (Neuroscience) were present to answer the most pressing question the general public supposedly has: "Why do scientists need this big thing and what will they do with it?"

After the press conference, NEMO and BinAC were jointly started with a "push of the magic button" by Theresia Bauer, minister for Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Hans-Jochen Schiewer, rector of the University of Freiburg, Prof. Dr. Peter Grathwohl, pro-rector for research of the University of Tübingen and Prof. Dr. Thomas Walter (Tübingen) and Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schneider (Freiburg), directors of the computing centers in Tübingen and Freiburg.

The public part of the inauguration took place in the Otto-Krayer-Haus of the University of Freiburg. During the first part of the event, about 100 attendants from the various scientific fields and from universities in Baden-Württemberg listened to short talks given by the the aforementioned representatives on the importance of the federate bwHPC approach and on the important milestone that was reached with all four bwForClusters and the bwUniCluster now operative.

The mandatory coffee break was coupled with a poster session where scientists could present results obtained by using the existing bwClusters or their planned activities on the new bwForClusters. Members of the bwHPC-C5 federate user support project used the opportunity to discuss HPC computing activities with current and prospective users.

The coffee break was followed up by a vendor-specific technology session. DALCO, the company that built the bwForCluster NEMO, hosted a talk by Hans Pabst from Intel with the title "Intel Xeon Phi x200 (Knights Landing): Performance Impressions and Best Practices". To contrast the "Many Integrated Cores" (MIC) approach for boosting HPC performance, the second technical talk was given by Ralph Hinsche from Nvidia, titled "Tesla P100 GPU and DGX-1 Deep Learning Appliances". This talk, referencing the "general-purpose computing on graphics processing units" (GPGPU) approach for boosting HPC performance, was hosted by Megware, the company that built the bwForCluster BinAC.

The inauguration event was completed with an informal get-together at the Rechenzentrum and the possibility for all participants to experience the bwForCluster NEMO live and in stereo.

The event was covered in the media, e.g. SWR-Landesschau (video), heise online, Badische Zeitung, Schwäbisches Tagblatt and Baden-FM (audio).