Dear reader,
At the beginning of a new year, we can reflect on the successes and challenges of the past year, on days and weeks that were beautiful and fulfilling, and on those difficult and exhausting. In this issue, we want to look back with you at what we have realized and how it builds on what we have already achieved. Over the past three years, the coronavirus pandemic has brought about several changes in our working world - home offices, virtual meetings, etc. At KIT, this has led to the question of how we can combine the advantages of the “old world” with the “new work” in a meaningful way to reach even greater satisfaction, agility, and flexibility in our work (p. 33).
Already ten years ago, the SCC was operating a central platform for collaborative software development at KIT. Gradually improved and following a sharp increase in demand from projects the platform is being modernized and expanded - a long way to go (p. 18). When looking at high-performance computing in Karlsruhe from its beginnings 40 years ago to the present day, the first “supercomputer” went into operation at the University of Karlsruhe in 1983. Since then, more than 30 supercomputers have been operated at KIT and its two predecessor institutions, which we properly celebrated with a festive colloquium (p. 35 and front page).
Sometimes however, it is worth looking back even further and asking whether the ancient processes of evolution also reveal clever approaches that help us to develop efficient algorithms to solve current problems. A new paper by SCC researchers on data-efficient machine learning of biomolecules confirms just that (p. 24).
And now on a personal note: from 1 January 2024 we will be looking into the future with a new name - Scientific Computing Center - but still with the same abbreviation SCC (p. 39) and wish you
Martin Frank, Bernhard Neumair, Martin Nußbaumer, Achim Streit