News

Science communities and data infrastructure providers work together to enhance scientific data services in Europe. An intensive exchange took place at the EUDAT Conference 2024 in Karlsruhe.

More than 110 participants from 20 countries took part in discussions on improving services and developing research data management at the conference organised with SCC. Speakers from the e-infrastructures  EGI, EUDAT , GÉANT, OpenAire, from the scientific communities EBRAINS, Helmholtz AI, ENVRI-Hub NEXT,  OSCARS, eLTER and others, adding supported by such as EOSC EU Node, Base4NFDI, FAIRCORE4EOSC and  EOSC Beyond met an interested audience in the premises of the world-renowned Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, ZKM. The presentations as well as the discussions and informal talks on the conference floor showed the interest and the necessity to intensify the cooperation with research and research organisations and providers of interoperable and international data services and their developers.
KIT is a member of EUDAT CDI, one of the leading European data infrastructures providing services to over 100 communities and groups.
 
Jos van Wezel
 

The topics on the agenda of the 28th ITB Assembly met with great interest. Over 300 people attended to find out about innovations to the SCC's range of services.

The SCC welcomed over 300 people from around 120 organizational units. 
The information on the urgent need for action in the context of the certification service (KIT-CA) was particularly important. The IT officers received information about necessary measures after it recently became known that the CA service provider Sectigo had surprisingly terminated its contract with GÉANT early. This means that the issuing of certificates at KIT will no longer be secured from 01.10.25 and certificates that expire in 2025 should in any case be renewed by the end of the year 2024.
Mr. Axel Maurer explained the technical basis of the KIT-Card and highlighted the security aspects of the KIT-Card. The KIT-Card meets the highest security requirements (Commen Criteria certification of EAL5+) if it is used by applications with DESFire. Interested parties are welcome to contact the KIT-Card Service Team if they have any questions regarding the use of the KIT-Card for specific applications.
The portfolio of services offered by the SCC is constantly being expanded. We also took a look at new and future IT services at the SCC.
With a view to the M365 roadmap, the SCC provided information about the introduction of Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint online. OneDrive will be offered as an additional data service at KIT in the future. The pilot phase in which various organizational units at KIT are participating is currently underway. OneDrive and Teams are based on SharePoint online, which means that SharePoint online can soon be used by several teams to manage documents. The SCC is calling on interested IT officers to participate in the development of these services.
The digitalization of administrative processes is already supported by the new KIT approval portal, which is described in detail in our SCC News 01|2024. A few processes have already been implemented there.
From 02/2025, the SCC can offer the organizational units at KIT data center space on the South Campus for the operation of server systems. The infrastructure and characteristics of the future “server housing” service were presented.
And AI is not stopping at the SCC's portfolio of services either. A new service will support transcription with OpenAI Whisper on local hardware and enable translation by the EU eTranslation service, while the two state projects bwCloud3 and bwJupyter are concerned with the addition of corresponding AI components (LLMs, Runner Harbor, K8s), among other things. 
Further information and topics can be found in the presentation for the ITB meeting.
Birgit Junker

The "Cloud Management" working group of the ZKI e.V. met on November 13/14, 2024 at the SCC of the KIT to discuss cloud strategies and experiences.

Translated with DeepL.com
 
Dr. Martin Nußbaumer, Director of SCC, and Torsten Prill, Chairman of ZKI e.V., welcomed the 58 participants to KIT Campus South. The agenda focused on two main topics - on the one hand, the different aspects of the cloud strategies of universities and colleges and, on the other hand, practical experience with the cloud computing models Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service.
 
The presentations on "Cloud strategies of the federal states and universities" showed a wide range of possible ways of dealing with "the cloud" and inspired a very lively exchange, as did the "(Practical) experiences with the use of IaaS and PaaS, especially at universities".
 
However, both focal points only represent small sections of the overall complex of the "Cloud Management" working group, as the joint identification of topics for the future of the working group showed. In addition, the report Cloud Management - Changes in administrative and provisioning processes, to which many working group members contributed, has now been officially published.
 
Patrick von der Hagen, Ulrich Weiß

On October 31, Daniel Coquelin defended his dissertation and successfully completed his doctorate at the KIT Department of Informatics with this important step.

Mr. Daniel Coquelin successfully completed his dissertation on 31.10.2024. His research focus in recent years has been on distributed machine learning.
Mr. Coquelin has made valuable contributions to distributed machine learning, particularly in the area of data parallel neural networks. His early work focused on communication-avoiding approaches to data parallel training. He then investigated the behavior of neural networks during training, observing that the orthogonal basis of weight matrices tends to stabilize during training. Based on this insight, he developed a novel method for training low-rank neural networks on distributed memory systems. This method allows for efficient scaling of training across multiple devices, leading to compressed neural networks that can outperform their full-rank counterparts. His work has implications for large-scale applications like natural language processing and computer vision. Mr. Coquelin's work was funded by the Helmholtz Analytics Framework (HAF) project and the Helmholtz Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Unit (Helmholtz AI) platform.
SCC congratulates Mr. Coquelin on the successful completion of his doctorate and wishes him all the best for his future career.
[1] Prof. Ina Schäfer (KIT, Chair of the Examination Board), Prof. Achim Streit (KIT, first supervisor), Prof. Håkan Grahn (Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (BTH), Sweden, external examiner/opponent), Prof. Ralf Reussner (KIT, examiner) , Prof. Thorsten Strufe (KIT, examiner)
 
Achim Grindler

Tim Niklas Uhl from KIT was one of the winners of this year's Golden Spike Awards. They were presented at the 27th Results and Review Workshop. The conference took place on October 10 and 11, 2024 at KIT.

On October 10 and 11, 2024, the 27th Results and Review Workshop took place at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The two-day conference, which brought together users of the supercomputers of the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) and the Scientific Computing Center (SCC), highlighted modern applications of high performance and supercomputing (HPC) and provided a platform for presenting research results and discussing issues of application performance and scalability of HPC.
Prof. Dr. Martin Frank (Director of the SCC, KIT) and Prof. Dr. Thomas Ludwig (Director of the DKRZ, Hamburg and Chairman of the Steering Committee) welcomed the participants to the event.
Current research results from computational fluid mechanics, climate research, computer science, reactive flows and other disciplines such as chemistry and materials science, bioinformatics, astrophysics and particle physics were presented in 21 lectures and a poster session. In addition to traditional HPC simulations, machine learning methods and strategies for improving energy efficiency were also discussed.
One of the highlights was the presentation of the Golden Spike Awards to outstanding research projects. Among the award winners was Tim Niklas Uhl (Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, KIT), who was honored for his work on scalable algorithms for big data applications.
Presentations from the KIT
Numerical Study of Shock-Wave Interaction with a Fully-Resolved Cloud of Immobile Particles (Swagat Kumar Nayak and Markus Uhlmann, Institute for Water and Environment) Modeling of Composition-Climate Interactions with ICON-ART (R. Ruhnke, P. Braesicke, L. Feld, P. Dietz, V. Hanft, K. Satitkovitchai, B.-M. Sinnhuber, M. Sinnhuber and S. Versick, Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research - Atmospheric Environmental Research) Providing Climate Information Inferred from Kilometer-Scale Modelling (Hendrik Feldmann, Marie Hundhausen, Evgenii Churiulin, Christine Mihalyfi-Dean, Joaquim G. Pinto, Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research - Tropospheric Research) Climate Change and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa: High-Resolution Dynamical Climate-Malaria Transmission Modeling near Victoria Lake, Kenya (Mame Diarra Bousso Dieng and Joël Arnault, Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research - Atmospheric Environmental Research, KIT-Campus Alpin) Scalable Discrete Algorithms for Big Data Applications (Lukas Hübner, Florian Kurpicz, Peter Sanders, Matthias Schimek, Dominik Schreiber, Daniel Seemaier, Tim Niklas Uhl, Institute for Theoretical Computer Science - Algorithm Engineering) Posters from the KIT
DNSPImpJets_HLRS: Reynolds Analogy in Smooth-Wall Turbulent Impinging Jets (Francesco Secchi, Institut für Strömungsmechanik) Turbulent Drag Reduction on a Transonic Airfoil with Shockwave Blades (Davide Gatti, Niccolo‘ Berizzi, Sergio Pirozzoli, Maurizio Quadrio, Institut für Strömungsmechanik) Anharmonic Correction to Adsorption Free Energy of O-Species on Pt(111) Surface from Thermodynamic Integration Using MLFF-MD Simulations (Thanh-Nam Huynh und Dmitry I. Sharapa, Institut für Katalyseforschung und -technologie) Further information:
www.hlrs.de/event/2024/review-ws-27 www.hlrs.de/news/detail/winners-of-the-2024-golden-spike-awards Carolin Breitzke

This year's bwHPC anniversary symposium took place on September 25 and 26, 2024 with over 80 participants in Freiburg im Breisgau.

On September 25 and 26, 2024, the 10th bwHPC Symposium took place at the University of Freiburg. This year's anniversary event attracted over 80 participants, who presented current developments in the field of high-performance computing (HPC). Over the course of two days, the bwHPC Symposium provided a platform for the exchange of knowledge and ideas in order to strengthen the role of HPC in research. Numerous scientists from all over Baden-Württemberg contributed their work. KIT was also represented by 23 researchers and contributed in the form of a tutorial, a poster presentation and two talks.
Contributions from KIT
On the first day of the symposium, Dr. Robert Barthel, with the help of Martje Armbrecht and Peter Weisbrod, led a tutorial on Introduction to HPC, which offered participants a comprehensive introduction to the use of the bwHPC infrastructure. The tutorial began with an introduction to the infrastructure and the objectives of the bwHPC-S5 project and provided information on how to access the resources. In addition, bwHPC services such as proactive user support were discussed. The first steps for using the bwForCluster and file transfer under Linux and Windows were then explained and an overview of the various data storage services was given. This was followed by an explanation of how to set up and run jobs on a cluster. Another important aspect was the use of different file systems on the clusters. This practice-oriented tutorial enabled participants to get straight into working with HPC clusters and gain valuable experience for their research.
KIT was also represented at the poster session. Ludmilla Obholz and Uwe Falke, with the help of co-authors Andreas Petzold and Serge Sushkov Evdoshenko, presented a poster on the Large Scale Data Facility at KIT (LSDF2), which is the central online data storage system available to all scientists and plays a key role in the storage and processing of large scientific data sets.
Sebastian Brommer's presentation on High Performance Computing Infrastructure for Particle Physics: The Experience of the Karlsruhe Groups was particularly exciting. Brommer explained the essential role of flexible and scalable computing resources for particle physics. At the Institute for Experimental Particle Physics (ETP) in Karlsruhe, the Overlay Batch System (OBS) is used as a uniform access point, which dynamically integrates additional computing resources from external locations using the meta-scheduling tool COBalD/TARDIS. The bwForCluster NEMO is a central resource that is used for simulations and data analyses in the context of large collaborations such as ATLAS, CMS and Belle II.
Another important contribution was made by Matthias Schnepf, who emphasized the role of the NEMO cluster in research into particle physics and dark matter in his presentation Belle II on NEMO: Flavour and Dark Matter Physics. He emphasized how HPC systems efficiently support the analysis of the enormous amounts of data generated in these physics experiments, sometimes through simulations.
About bwHPC
The bwHPC program is an initiative of the state of Baden-Württemberg that offers researchers access to high-performance computing resources for data-intensive research projects. The annual bwHPC symposium promotes exchange and interdisciplinary cooperation in the field of high-performance computing.
The symposium takes place every year, and we are already looking forward to participation and attendance at the bwHPC Symposium 2025!
 
Further information on the symposium can be found on the bwHPC website.
 
Carolin Breitzke

In collaboration with DLR, researchers at Helmholtz.AI are developing an AI-supported heliostat optimization. Heliostats are sun-tracking mirrors for solar thermal power plants. This significantly increases the efficiency of the power plants.

At a test facility in Jülich, operated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), nearly 2,000 mirrors are aligned to reflect sunlight onto an absorber atop a tower. These solar tower power plants can complement wind and photovoltaic energy as a renewable energy source. The heat they concentrate can be used to generate electricity, power thermal industrial processes, or even stored for use during nighttime or in calm wind conditions. Like other renewable technologies, solar thermal power plants face significant cost pressures. To stay competitive, cost-saving measures are essential. Given that heliostats are a key expense, optimizing their production and performance is crucial. Currently, the mirrors are not perfectly flat, leading to uneven heat distribution at the tower, requiring high safety margins and thus reducing efficiency.
Researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), together with consultants from Helmholtz.AI at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and SCC at KIT, have therefore developed a new AI-based method to easily detect irregularities in the mirrors. Their results have been published in Nature Communications.
Further information on the Helmholtz.AI website Publication in Nature Communications  
Contact at SCC: Dr. Markus Götz
 
Achim Grindler
 

From 10 to 12 September 2024, the NFDI-MatWerk Summer School on Research Data Management in Materials Science and Engineering took place in Bremen.

From 10 to 12 September 2024, the NFDI-MatWerk Summer School on Research Data Management in Materials Science and Engineering took place in Bremen, hosted at the University of Bremen and organized by the scientific consortium National Research Data Infrastructure for Materials Science & Engineering (NFDI-MatWerk).
The aim of this summer school was to guide researchers to put FAIR principles into practice focusing more on the research area Materials Science & Engineering.
Dr. Rossella Aversa and Sabrine Chelbi, both from SCC, held two lectures: “The journey towards Metadata Management”, representing the theory part about understanding the importance and the added value of metadata, and “Metadata Management in practice using MatWerk tools”, including specific metadata management tools offered by NFDI-MatWerk as well as various tutorials and hands-on activities.
The attendees participated actively and manifested their positive feedback in the final survey.
Dr. Rossella Aversa, Sabrine Chelbi

High school students can still apply until October 23, 2024.

In 2024, enthusiastic students can once again apply to conduct research at the SCC as part of projects related to computer science and mathematical modeling. The projects are supervised by SCC scientists and deal with topics from simulation, high-performance computing, management and analysis of large amounts of data.
More information at s.kit.edu/fssw
 
Achim Grindler

SCC held an International User Forum for the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) from September 9 to 12. The Forum is an exchange platform for all institutions that use and operate HPSS.

SCC held an International User Forum for the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) from September 9 to 12. There were 60 participants from 26 HPSS facilities. Of these, 30 were from Europe, 24 from America and Canada and 6 from Asia. The User Forum is an exchange of all facilities that use HPSS.
The HPSS storage software fulfills the most demanding requirements for long-term scalable storage requirements. Magnetic tape is the most economical storage solution for infrequently accessed data and is often referred to as "zero-watt storage". However, read access to tape data can also be scaled efficiently with the right installation. There is no one way to set up an HPSS, and each facility adapts it very precisely to its own needs. Typically, an HPSS is used by facilities that want to store large amounts of data over a long period of time. Many of these institutions deal with weather or climate research data, which is usually kept for a long time. The SCC certainly does not operate the largest installation, but it is one of the most active and innovative facilities that gets the maximum out of the hardware and achieves very good throughput rates. The German Tier 1 center for the Large Hadron Collider GridKa operated at SCC and the bwDataArchive service use an HPSS as tape storage technology. A disaster recovery installation for the Large Scale Data Facility to store large volumes of scientific data is also being set up.
During the user forum, both the developers reported on the next innovations and the use of their installations and the associated peculiarities. There were also reports on how and with which tools the systems are monitored. Efficient system monitoring is essential, as bottlenecks or problems need to be identified quickly in order to be able to react accordingly.

The HPSS community describes itself as a "big friendly family" in which a good exchange is maintained and people help each other.
During the four days:
shared operational experiences and the various HPSS upgrades and lessons learned Techniques for managing workload performance were presented in order to organize data on tape and optimize tape drive access. HPSS monitoring tools and scenarios of how end-user interfaces utilize HPSS were presented Diagnostic and troubleshooting guides for tape drives explained told "horror stories" from sites and how they overcame them and last but not least, reports on new projects that the sites are working on. In addition to the many technical presentations and lively discussions, there was a GridKa tour and a social get-together with a delicious tarte flambée meal at the SCC. The Schlosslichtspiele Karlsruhe were a highlight of the social program and the excellent conference dinner was accompanied by a museum tour about AI at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM).
 
Doris Ressmann

In the User Portal (UP), approvers can now set up substitutions directly in the inbox to ensure a smooth transition for approval processes in the event of absences.

Since mid-August, substitutes for the approval of HR tasks (time bookings, absence requests) can be set up in the Inbox. To do this, open the Inbox and then select the "Manage my substitutes" function via the button for your own profile at the top right. You can create planned and unplanned substitutions, which must then be activated by the person taking over the substitution.

With the introduction of the easyBANF app, the successor system for the SRM procurement system, planned for September 18, substitutions for the approval of shopping baskets can also be set up.
More information on the inbox and setting up substitutions.
The UP(up.scc.kit.edu) is constantly being expanded with new functions. Current information can be found in the news app in the UP or on our website.



(translated with DeepL.com)

The new SCC News is online, including these topics: HoreKa receives highly energy-efficient extension; workflow system for digital approval processes; power consumption measurements for sustainable AI.

Download SCC-News 1/2024

Dear reader,
IT companies such as Google and Microsoft are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) in their products. The huge computing power required for this is usually provided by state-of-the-art graphics processing units (GPUs). These in turn require a lot of electrical energy to process AI algorithms. But how can modern computer systems run more efficiently and sustainably without slowing down progress? In this issue, SCC shows you some of the changes that can be made.

First, it is important that computer systems can perform more calculations with less energy. Our supercomputer HoreKa has demonstrated this impressively after its new upgrade. It is now the sixth most energy-efficient computer in the world (p. 20). Another option is to generate the required electricity locally from renewable energy sources. KIT is currently installing several large solar systems on the roofs of its institutes. The roof of the SCC buildings alone will have a peak output of about 500 kW.

There is also room for improvement in software. Initiated by SCC the research community has started to discuss how measuring the power consumption of AI software can serve as a sustainability metric (p. 23). However, it is not only energy saving that contributes to sustainability in IT. One example is the sustainable storage of research data. The SCC is developing concepts that will enable researchers from different disciplines and locations to work efficiently with existing data (p. 5 and 27).

Finally in this SCC News, we talk about digitalisation of KIT's business processes – i.e. electronic workflows – which will further reduce errors, working time, and paper consumption (p. 16). Speaking of paper: starting with this issue, we will be sending out SCC News exclusively in digital form and in a new layout.
Enjoy reading!
Martin Frank, Martin Nußbaumer, Achim Streit
 
Achim Grindler

Prof. Dr. Nadja Klein leads the newly established research group Methods for Big Data (MBD). It develops novel statistical and mathematical approaches at the intersection of Bayesian statistics and machine learning.

In August, Professor Nadja Klein was jointly appointed to the Professor Methods for Big Data by the Department of Informatics and the Scientific Computing Center (SCC) at KIT. Previously, Prof. Klein was Professor for Statistics and Data Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
At SCC, Prof. Dr. Nadja Klein leads the newly established research group Methods for Big Data (MBD), which develops novel statistical and mathematical techniques for the quantification of uncertainties in statistical and machine learning by leveraging Bayesian statistics. MBD also tries to make models more robust and data-efficient via the integration of prior knowledge. The research activities of the MBD group focus on both theoretical and empirical aspects as well as on interdisciplinary projects where theoretically-based methods are tailored to applications. Further details about the group’s activities can be found at kleinlab-statml.github.io.
 
 
Achim Grindler

From 12 to 14 June 2024, the NFFA-Europe Summer School on Data Management and Virtual Access took place. The school in numbers: 3 days in Heraklion, 8 sessions, 29 participants, 12 instructors, 3 of which from SCC

From 12 to 14 June 2024, the NFFA-Europe Summer School on Data Management and Virtual Access took place in Heraklion (Greece), hosted at the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), as part of the training activities organized by NFFA-Europe, a Research and Innovation Action under the H2020 Work Programme. Dr. Rossella Aversa (one of the scientific organizers), Thomas Jejkal, and Nicolas Blumenröhr, all from SCC, travelled to Greece to hold their lectures.
The aim of the three-day Summer School was to guide researchers to effectively put FAIR principles into practice and to make use of Virtual Access services, a novel set of cloud services offered by NFFA-Europe, which includes innovative online simulation services, databases, machine learning services, data analysis and metadata management.
The instructors introduced specific data and metadata management tools (data management plans, repositories, metadata schemas) as well as each of the Virtual Access services. The sessions were widely supported by dedicated tutorials and hands-on activities.
The attendees, including technicians, graduate students, post-docs, and young researchers from academic and industrial communities, participated actively and manifested their positive feedback in the final survey.
 
Dr. Rossella Aversa, Thomas Jejkal

From mid-July 2024, the digital process for commissioning authorizations in the User Portal (UP) will replace the PDF application forms used to date, offering numerous advantages.

From July 10, 2024, a new function called "Request authorizations" will be available to KIT employees in the User Portal (UP). This is a digital form that KIT employees can use to apply for authorizations in the UP for themselves or for third parties and for authorized persons to approve them.
The digital form replaces the previously used PDF application forms, which will only be accepted until July 22, 2024. 
The following authorizations can be applied for and approved via the digital procedure.
Finance and HR reports with BW Creation and approval of shopping carts in SRM Correct signature and approval of incoming invoices in AREB Administration of guest and partner Approval of person days Once the application has been submitted, the person for whom the authorizations have been requested must first approve the application. The responsible manager then receives a notification by email to approve or reject the application via a link contained therein. If approved, the application is forwarded to the SCC and processed there as before.
The new digital process offers numerous advantages:
Support when completing the form: Users are guided through the form and, for example, are only given the valid account assignment elements (cost center, WBS elements) to choose from, depending on the information provided Simpler approval: Approvers receive a notification email and can approve the request via a link. Signatures or digital signatures are no longer required. Transparent and traceable process: The responsible line manager is automatically determined from the centrally stored information in the organizational management and the funds center plan. Applicants can track the status of the approval process. Further information on the digital procedure or on authorizations in general can be found on Authorizations for UP. If you have any further questions, please contact our SCC Service Desk. 
SCC Service Team

The way is clear for the cloud-based software platform Microsoft 365 at KIT. The Executive Board decides to provide such a platform for all employees.

At the end of May 2024, the Executive Board of KIT decided to provide all KIT employees with the cloud-based software platform Microsoft 365 (M365). The associated goal is to achieve a balanced use of the software in terms of maximum possible functionality on the one hand and data protection precautions and information security on the other. The Digital Office and the Scientific Computing Center (SCC) are commissioned to take care of the implementation and the further necessary steps in accordance with the roadmap for the extended use of M365 at KIT.
At the end of May 2024, the Executive Board of KIT decided to provide all KIT employees with the cloud-based software platform Microsoft 365 (M365). The associated goal is a balanced use of the software in terms of maximum possible functionality on the one hand and data protection precautions and information security on the other.
To this end, the SCC has developed a roadmap for the extended use of M365. We are gradually providing the following functionalities, among others:
Guest access to M365 services for collaboration with external parties M365 access accounts for all employees OneDrive and SharePoint-Online as online storage services Intune for managing apps and settings on mobile devices Hybrid provision of Microsoft Exchange for groupware functionalities, such as calendar use in MS Teams The roadmap, aspects of security and data protection and the next steps were presented and discussed at the meeting of IT appointees in May 2024.
 
Achim Grindler

Based on the successful AARC Blueprint Architecture model, AARC TREE takes the integration of research infrastructures to the next level.

Collaboration and sharing of resources is crucial for research. Authentication and Authorization Infrastructures (AAI) play a key role in enabling federated interoperable access to resources.
The AARC Technical Revision to Enhance Effectiveness (AARC TREE) project takes the successful and globally recognized Authentication and Authorization for Research Collaboration (AARC) model and its flagship deliverable, the AARC Blueprint Architecture (BPA), as a foundation to drive the next phase of research infrastructure integration: Expanding federated access management to integrate user-centric technologies, expanding access to federated data and services (authorization), consolidating existing capabilities, and avoiding fragmentation and unnecessary duplication.
SCCs participates in AARC-TREE to continue developing the Blueprint Architectures. Here we contribute to technical recommendations, as well as to policy development. Since SCC is also a core member of the IAM project of the german NFDI, we can raise the awareness of NFDI requirements in AARC, as well as feed new developments back to NFDI, in a very timely manner.

Contact at the SCC: Dr. Marcus Hardt
Achim Grindler

More than 250 IT representatives (ITB) from KIT attended the 27th meeting to find out about new developments in the IT infrastructure and the IT services offered at the SCC.

The meeting of the SCC takes place twice a year in an online format.
This time, a total of 260 people from around 100 organizational units were welcomed.
In addition to the main topic of the introduction of Microsoft cloud services, which was the subject of lively and critical discussion, the agenda also included topics, changes and plans in the areas of studying and teaching, research and administration.
For example, the introduction of HISinOne STU in June 2024 and a state service with Jupyter (bwJupyter currently in the pilot phase) were reported on, as well as current information on plans in the User Portal (UP) for EasyBanf, new ESS/MSS functions and the assignment of authorizations. 
The authentication and authorization infrastructure (AAI) operated centrally at the SCC is already used nationwide and is to be expanded. In future, further identities, including BundID, will be integrated into the AAI software RegApp developed by the SCC.
The presentation of this event, as well as all previous presentations, can be viewed by all members of KIT on the SCC's Partnership Cooperation website. 
IT representatives (ITB) have the opportunity to report topic requests to the SCC at any time in the run-up to the next event in November 2024 and beyond. Employees should contact the ITB in their organizational units directly to submit any IT-relevant topics.


Birgit Junker

The Karlsruhe high-performance computer (HoreKa) is currently one of the fastest computers in Europe. A recent upgrade also puts it in 6th place in the biannual Green 500 list of the world's most energy-efficient computers.

The Karlsruhe high-performance computer(HoreKa) is being upgraded to a new level, including for use in high-scaling calculations with artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve complex scientific questions. The new components are combined in a separate partition, HoreKa-Teal (see photo), and contain 88 NVIDIA H100 accelerator processors. The systems are hot-water cooled and, with an energy efficiency of 63 GigaFLOPS (billions of computing operations) per watt, are among the top 10 most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world. HoreKa-Teal ranks 6th on the current Green500 list. This represents another significant improvement on the result when it was commissioned in 2021 (13th place). The total performance of HoreKa thus increases to over 20 quadrillion computing operations per second (20 PetaFLOPS).
To the press release of the KIT
 
Achim Grindler

In the ARTIST project "AI-enhanced differentiable Ray Tracer for Irradiation-concentrating Solar Towers", researchers are developing a digital twin to optimize solar power plants.

Thermal solar tower plants are renewable energy facilities that use mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver. Here, the heat energy is collected and used for industrial processes or electricity generation without greenhouse gas emissions. Together with the German Aerospace Center, researchers at the SCC are creating a comprehensive digital twin of thermal solar power systems that can simulate how sunlight travels through these plants and collects at the receiver. Based on ray tracing principles, this simulation improves predictions of how much sunlight the mirrors will receive, thus optimizing their alignment to maximize the energy yield without overheating the receiver.
In the new ARTIST project, we aim to enhance a physics-based raytracer with artificial intelligence to create a data-driven digital copy of the power plant, which can then be used to design, control, predict, and diagnose issues during daily operations. This AI-enhanced system can optimize various aspects of the plant's operation, such as the mirror aimpoint, based on real-time conditions. In addition, we can explain certain operative actions in the plant's operation. We will test our digital twin at a real power plant in Jülich, Germany, marking a major milestone towards fully automated solar tower power plants.
 
Dr. Marie Weiel

As part of the joint project “Materialized Holiness”, SCC researchers have the unique opportunity to visit one of the most valuable collections of literature in the world.

Admittedly, the words “Vatican Library” or “Sacred Manuscripts” do not immediately bring to mind computer science or the SCC. But digital research data management bridges the gap between the Vatican Library's valuable books and manuscripts and modern information science methods. As part of the joint project “Materialized holiness” funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), researchers from the SCC are working with experts in Jewish Studies and materials science to investigate medieval Torah scrolls and their transformation into the digital world. In particular, the question arises as to how the multi-perspective information content of the Torah scrolls can be converted into machine-readable, structured objects and data in order to enable targeted computer-aided analyses and visualizations. In order to study and collect this information, it is essential to view the real objects.
The Vatican Library's collection contains two medieval Torah scrolls as well as many other interesting manuscripts relevant to the project. In April, Laura Frank and Dr. Danah Tonne (both SCC) were granted access to the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana together with the Jewish Studies experts to examine these treasures. Under strict supervision and after many security checks, the researchers were allowed to examine the ancient, valuable objects for any special characteristics and differences. Laura Frank and Danah Tonne were not only able to gain deep insights into the work of the humanities scholars, but also clarify many questions about the data models designed and the technical implementation of their own research work.


Laura Frank

The SOL-AI project, in which SCC is also involved, aims to accelerate the development and optimization of photovoltaic materials using state-of-the-art AI models.

In the SOL-AI project, KIT and partners combine the development of new generations of solar cells with state-of-the-art approaches to artificial intelligence (AI/AI) and machine learning (ML). The Scientific Computing Center (SCC) of KIT is represented by tenure-track professor Sebastian Krumscheid. Sebastian Krumscheid is a research group leader at SCC and an expert in uncertainty quantification (UQ). AI and ML are also used here in the design of new and more efficient materials for photovoltaics. The goal is to create an AI model that adapts to the diverse challenges of materials science.
The Helmholtz Association is funding a total of four projects on basic models for artificial intelligence. KIT is involved in two of these projects (see KIT press release).
Contact at SCC: TT-Prof. Dr. Sebastian Krumscheid
 
Achim Grindler

The AI4EOSC project announces the first Open Call for new Use cases! The goal is to onboard researchers, businesses, and innovators developing innovative solutions and support them by taking advantage of AI/ML/DL technologies.

AI4EOSC platform recently had its first release. It provides a user-friendly workbench and toolbox for developing and running AI models, tightly integrated with the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud).

With its first release, the AI4EOSC project announces the first Open Call for new Use cases! The goal is to onboard researchers, businesses, and innovators developing innovative solutions and help them improve their products and services by taking advantage of AI/ML/DL technologies and models within the EOSC. Research organizations, researchers, start-ups, spin-offs or, SMEs from EU countries (eligible for HE) are invited to apply for this Open Call.
For details: please, see this announecement
Deadline: extended to May 15, 2024, 11:59 pm CEST
Dr. Valentin Kozlov

SCC now also checks internal e-mails that may pose a potential threat to the IT infrastructure at KIT. There is a particular risk potential when sending specific files as e-mail attachments.

E-mails with potentially dangerous files attached have long been blocked when sending to or receiving from external parties (see also Policy changes to incoming mail systems), as these files, such as Office files containing macros, are often used by attackers to infiltrate malware (so-called macro viruses). In order to close this popular gateway for attackers, SCC will increase the security of e-mail communication within the KIT and, for example, check e-mails for such potentially dangerous files and block them if necessary. The mail routing for KIT mailboxes will be adapted for this purpose.
From Tuesday, April 23, 2024, e-mails sent from KIT mailbox to KIT mailbox will also be checked. From this date, emails with potentially dangerous files attached will therefore be rejected and will no longer reach the target addresses.
This applies in particular to e-mails with the following attachments
RTF files or Word/Excel documents with macros (*.docm and *.xlsm) IMPORTANT: Please note the following information!
If it is necessary to send documents with such potentially dangerous document types internally, use mail encryption (S/MIME) or use the services provided for exchanging documents:
File exchange and online storage for desktop data (bwSync&Share) KIT team pages KIT data storage (OU directory) MS Teams matrix etc. Depending on the confidentiality of the data contained in these documents, use the appropriate file exchange service. Get also user guidance via the various service documetation.
Note
After the implementation of this extension and the associated improvement of IT security at KIT, sending e-mails via the smtp.kit.edu service from outside will again be possible without a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Information about this change can also be found in our operational messages.
SCC Support Team

Sebastian Krumscheid erarbeitet mit Studierenden Konzepte für Problemlösungen aus aktuellen Anwendungsbeispielen. Er erhält für seine herausragende Lehre den KIT-Fakultätslehrpreis 2024: Mathematik.

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Sebastian Krumscheid lehrt an der KIT-Fakultät Mathematik und leitet am SCC die Forschungsgruppe Uncertainty Quantification (UQ). Seine Gruppe entwickelt moderne mathematische und numerische Techniken zur Behandlung und Quantifizierung von Unsicherheiten in komplexen Rechenmodellen.
An der KIT-Fakultät Mathematik vertritt Sebastian Krumscheid das Fachgebiet Uncertainty Quantification in der Lehre. In seinen Vorlesungen lernen die Studierenden moderne Methoden der angewandten Mathematik zu beherrschen. Sie lernen, die Unsicherheiten in mathematischen Modellen und komplexen Berechnungsmodellen zu quantifizieren und untersuchen gemeinsam mit Sebastian Krumscheid aktuelle Anwendungsbeispiele des maschinellen Lernens, den Wirtschaftswissenschaften oder den Naturwissenschaften, um Lösungskonzepte zu entwickeln.
Die KIT-Fakultät Mathematik ehrt Sebastian Krumscheid für seine innovativen und praxisorientierte Lehrkonzepte zu hochkomplexen mathematischen Methoden mit dem Fakultätslehrpreis.
Das SCC gratuliert Herrn Krumscheid herzlich zu dieser Auszeichnung.



Achim Grindler

SCC is launches the pilot phase of the "JupyterHub for Teaching" service. The aim of the project is to strengthen research-oriented teaching at KIT, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, simulation and modeling.

In the summer semester 2024, SCC will start the pilot phase of the new JupyterHub for Teaching service for teaching. The aim of the project is to strengthen research-oriented teaching, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, simulation and modeling, by providing a KIT-wide JupyterHub.

Computer-aided modeling and simulation has long been used not only in the natural sciences and technology, but also in almost all areas of research, from social sciences and humanities to medicine.

Especially in the rapidly growing field of AI, the application possibilities are endless. This results in new demands on the skills of graduates from all disciplines. In order to be able to use the numerous tools effectively, training must include not only subject-specific topics but also teach knowledge of common programming languages and their use in computer-aided computing. In order for this to succeed, the entry level should be as low-threshold as possible and the handling should be simple.
The open-source software JupyterHub offers this possibility. The web-based, interactive environment enables students to test and execute code from the most common programming languages (including Julia, Python and R) without having to install software on their own computer. The service is therefore independent of device and location, allowing students to use it conveniently from anywhere.
The pilot phase involves 30 courses with a total of around 2000 students. The service is to be expanded further in the coming winter semester. JupyterHub for Teaching will also be integrated into the ILIAS learning platform at KIT to make it easy and efficient to use in teaching.
 
Achim Grindler

The Research Software Engineering Community at KIT has launched a new website as a source of information

The new page www.rse-community.kit.edu serves, among other things, as a starting point for those looking for information, events and services on the broad topic of Research Software Engineering (RSE). It is also intended to stimulate the exchange of knowledge on interesting RSE topics and issues.
Take a look and find out more about this new website: Here you can find out exactly what research software is and what we mean by Research Software Engineering. You will also find an extensive collection of links to sources of information at KIT, nationally and internationally. Feedback is possible and expressly welcome via the e-mail address given in the footer.
To the Website RSE-Community
 
Achim Grindler

These three workshops give a detailed insight how to develop AI/ML/DL models and applications in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

The AI4EOSC (Artificial Intelligence for the European Open Science Cloud), an EU-funded project that delivers an enhanced set of advanced services for the development of AI/ML/DL models and applications in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), organises a series of online workshops:
AI development in the EOSC
Day 1, March 22nd, 10:00 - 12:00 CEST: AI4EOSC platform introduction Day 2, April 8th, 14:00 - 16:00 CEST: Image processing with AI4EOSC Day 3, April 22nd, 14:00 - 16:00 CEST: Federated learning in the EOSC  
For the overview, agenda and registration, please, visit ai4eosc.eu/events/ai4eosc-workshops-on-ai-development-in-the-eosc/
 
Contact at SCC: Dr. Valentin Kozlov

Login names for KIT employees in the form "vorname.nachname@kit.edu" will be discontinued. Authentication on systems can thus only be carried out via the personal KIT account in the form "ab1234" or "ab1234@kit.edu".

At currently, KIT employees log in to central KIT IT services (KIT mailbox, computers in kit.edu, etc.) with the currently valid login names in the form "kit\<ab1234>" or "<firstname.surname>@kit.edu".
The variant "<firstname.surname>@kit.edu" for KIT employees will now be changed to the new login name "<ab1234>@kit.edu".
The intention is to make the login name of a user account independent of a person's name change and to standardize the login name across all systems.
In addition, by standardizing the login name, for example, people who have agreed to use Microsoft Teams via https://my.scc.kit.edu will be able to use their Exchange calendar under Microsoft Teams in future. 
The change will take place successively from 09:00 on Monday, 18.03.2024.
The login names will be changed successively, i.e. the individual user accounts of all KIT employees will be converted one by one. After the conversion of a user account, it will no longer be possible to log in to the central IT services of KIT with "<firstname.surname>@kit.edu" for this account. From this point on, the new login name "<ab1234>@kit.edu" of the user account must be used where "<firstname.surname>@kit.edu" was otherwise used for login.
Employees can find further information at:
KIT > SCC > Services > Working environment > User account (password) > KIT user account > Change login name.
The IT representatives in the organizational (ITB) units, who have already been informed about the change, will certainly help. However, queries can also be sent by email to it-support@scc.kit.edu.
 


SCC Service Team

Almost the same time, on February 8 and 9, Elnaz Azmi and Oskar Taubert had the defense of their dissertations and were able to successfully complete their doctorates at the KIT Department of Informatics with this important step.

Ms. Elnaz Azmi successfully completed her dissertation on 8.2.2024. Since 2017, she has been working on the challenge of reducing the resource requirements of environmental simulations by using machine learning methods. One day later, Oskar Taubert was also able to celebrate the successful defense of his dissertation. Since 2018, Mr Taubert has been working on the machine learning of sparse data problems in biology and biologically inspired optimization algorithms adapted to high-performance computing (HPC).
Ms. Azmi has worked extensively with simulations in the environmental sciences, which are essential for the understanding of complex natural phenomena. Due to their high spatial and temporal resolution, these often impose high demands on available computing resources. In her research, Ms Azmi worked on increasing the efficiency of computationally intensive simulations by applying approximation and optimization approaches to examples from hydrology and climate science. The aim was to use machine learning to recognize similarities in time and space within the simulations and thus develop a method to reduce redundancies. By integrating an unsupervised learning module directly into the simulation code and replacing part of the simulation with a neural network, Ms. Azmi showed that by identifying model redundancies and reducing computational complexity, the efficiency of the simulations can be increased, thereby reducing resource requirements.
Mr. Taubert applied machine learning to the prediction of the structure of biomolecules. In order to make the best possible use of the limited training data available, he combined various methods: self-supervised neural networks, fine-tuning and gradient boosted decision trees. The parameterization of these complex model processes is made possible by algorithms adapted to the computing environment, which use the given computing resources efficiently to propose new models and train them. The contributions researched by Mr. Taubert on models generated with sparse data and on model architecture search should also be used in scientific machine learning in the future. Mr. Taubert's work was funded by the Helmholtz Analytics Framework (HAF) project, a "Google Faculty Research Award" received in the Multiscal Biomolecular Simulation research group and the Helmholtz Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Unit (Helmholtz AI) platform.
SCC congratulates Ms. Azmi and Mr. Taubert on successfully completing their doctorates and wishes them all the best for their future careers.
Dissertation of Elnaz Azmi: Approximation and Optimization of Compute-Intensive Environmental Simulations through Machine Learning Methods
Dissertation of Oskar Taubert: Machine Learning from Evolution
 
Achim Grindler
 

The new SCC News is online, including these topics: GitLab – Core Service for collaborative Software Projects; Data Efficient Machine Learning of Biomolecules; New Work at SCC: collaborative, flexible, agile – innovative.

Download SCC-News 2/2023
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
happy reading.
Martin Frank, Bernhard Neumair, Martin Nußbaumer, Achim Streit


Achim Grindler

The SAP web portal was shut down at the end of 2023. The User Portal (UP) is now the central portal for employees for SAP-based digital administrative processes at KIT.

Translated with DeepL.com
Previously, KIT employees had access to various digital administration services (e.g. Employee Self Service, the Business Warehouse (BW) for financial and personnel reports and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) for procurements) via the SAP web portal.
At the end of 2023, the SAP web portal was shut down and replaced by the User Portal (UP), which had been productive in parallel to the SAP web portal since fall 2022. UP is based on current SAP technologies and concepts, is now available in two languages - German and English - and can also be used on mobile devices with common web browsers. Over 15 apps are already available in UP. UP will be continuously expanded and new functions and apps added in 2024.
The replacement of the SAP web portal with the new portal is an important interim step in updating KIT's SAP system landscape. The next milestone is the planned replacement of the previous SRM system for self-service processes in procurement by the easyBANF solution integrated in UP in mid-2024.
Current information can be found in the UP service description
 
Martin Hengel
 

At the end of September 2023 the first set of Virtual Access (VA) services was released and integrated into the NFFA-Europe research infrastructure.

VA is a novelty in NFFA-Europe Pilot, which makes available online simulation and machine learning services, as well as data and metadata services, to the whole scientific community. The services currently target specific use cases, corresponding to the initial scientific needs they were designed for. The SCC strongly encourages feedback and contributions by the community in order to cover new use cases and to enhance the offer!
 
Project article on the NFFA-Europe website


Dr. Rossella Aversa

With the renaming, KIT is distancing itself from the namesake of the SCC, Karl Steinbuch. From January 1, 2024, Scientific Computing Center (SCC) will be the new name.

Translated with DeepL.com
Karl Steinbuch is considered a co-founder of computer science. The Information Technology Center of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has been called the "Steinbuch Centre for Computing" since 2008. New findings now show that Karl Steinbuch, who researched and taught in Karlsruhe, already identified with unacceptable acts of war as a young man during the Nazi era. Regardless of his professional achievements, KIT is distancing itself from Steinbuch due to the new research findings and will therefore rename the KIT Information Technology Center the "Scientific Computing Center".
After Karl Steinbuch had shown a moderate political orientation in his scientifically creative phase, he turned to far-right positions after his retirement. Since it was already known in 2017 on Karl Steinbuch's 100th birthday that his views moved away from the political center with increasing age, that he turned to right-wing extremism after his retirement and regularly published articles in journals close to the far-right NPD at an advanced age, the KIT Executive Board expressly combined the recognition of Karl Steinbuch's professional achievements with the statement that KIT did not share the political views that Steinbuch held at an advanced age.
New findings about Karl Steinbuch
There are now new findings on Steinbuch's biography that show that even as a young man during the Nazi era, Karl Steinbuch identified with unacceptable acts of war (Anton F. Guhl: Kurskorrekturen eines Technokraten - Die politische Rechtswendung des Nachrichtentechnikers und Zukunftsforschers Karl Steinbuch nach 1970; Technikgeschichte Vol. 87 (2020) H. 4, pp. 315-334).
Name change from January 1, 2024
KIT has therefore decided to change the name of the Information Technology Center of KIT. The decision was confirmed in the KIT committees. KIT will implement the name change to "Scientific Computing Center" from January 1, 2024.
To the identical press release of KIT (german only)
 

SCC and Helmholtz-AI, in cooperation with FZJ and DLR, publish a study in Communications Biology that proposes how modern and classical deep machine learning methods can be combined in a data-efficient manner.

Translated with DeepL.com
Life is determined at the cellular level by various biomolecules. They constitute the machinery of living organisms and play a crucial role in the functioning of each cell. Machine learning is increasingly being used to study their function and related structure. Members of the Multiscale Biomolecular Simulation research group and the Helmholtz AI team, in cooperation with Forschungszentrum Jülich and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), have now proposed a method to combine modern and classical deep machine learning methods to build models even in data-poor scenarios.
The researchers use a deep learning approach to predict spatial neighborhoods between RNA building blocks (called nucleotides). Similar to what happens in a LEGO model, when individual Lego bricks are replaced in one location, the bricks in the neighborhood must adjust so that the entire structure still fits together. The BARNACLE model proposed in the study uses this idea for RNA: nucleotides that are spatially close together in RNA are also more likely to mutate together during evolution. And it is precisely these emergent mutation patterns that the model looks for. To train the model, it relies on a combination of self-supervised pre-training on lots of sequence data and efficient use of the few structural data. BARNACLE showed significant improvement with this approach over established classical statistical approaches but also other neural networks. It also shows that the method is transferable to related tasks with similar data constraints.
The results of this study were published in the paper "RNA Contact Prediction by Data Efficient Deep Learning" in the journal Communications Biology.
To the Communications Biology paper Contact persons at SCC: Dr. Markus Götz, Oskar Taubert  
 
Achim Grindler
 

The Worldwide LHC Computing GridKa Tier-1 center is massively expanding its storage. An additional newly installed 71 petabytes of online storage are available. Data migration is now complete for almost all experiments.

In spring 2023, the expansion of the online storage system for the GridKa Tier-1 center in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid at KIT was put into operation. The newly installed 71 petabytes are available to the LHC experiments ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and the experiments Belle-II, Pierre Auger Observatory, Icecube and DARWIN and also replace 30 petabytes of storage hardware that will be decommissioned after six years. In total, GridKa now has 99 petabytes of online storage.
Unfortunately, the commissioning was delayed by a year due to the chip and logistics crisis following the Corona pandemic and the Ukraine war. The new installation consists of high-density Seagate CORVAULT systems with a total of 4664 18-terabyte hard drives, 70 servers and Infiniband switches that were integrated into the existing Infiniband network fabrics. IBM Storage Scale is used as the software-defined storage tier. The existing file systems were not extended, but new file systems were created. This allows new NVMe-based metadata storage systems to be deployed and new features of IBM Storage Scale to be used. The data for almost all experiments has already been migrated and the systems are in productive operation.
 
Contact at SCC: Dr. Serge Sushkov
 
Achim Grindler

On September 14, KIT celebrated the 40-year era of high-performance computing in Karlsruhe with a festive colloquium. The invited guests enjoyed the opportunity to learn and exchange information about the entire range of HPC in Karlsruhe.

Translated with DeepL.com
On September 14, 2023, the SCC celebrated the era of high-performance computing, which has already spanned 40 years in Karlsruhe, with an internal festive colloquium. The invited guests from research policy and management, data center planning, construction and operation, as well as scientists, both former and active, were able to learn first-hand about the entire range of 40 years of high-performance computing in Karlsruhe during lectures, panel discussions, as well as an exhibition and guided tours. There was plenty of room to review successes and challenges, to philosophize a bit about the future, and of course to celebrate together and share interesting stories.
In his welcoming remarks, Peter Castellaz, the head of the department responsible for HPC at the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts (MWK), highlighted the state's bwHPC strategy, with which the SCC has not only implemented important aspects of content, but also played a leading role in an intensively lived culture of cooperation. "In addition to the HPC-specific resources and the associated methodological knowledge, KIT has successfully contributed in particular with its expertise in the field of data and research software", says Peter Castellaz. He finds words of praise for the state-wide federated identity management bwIDM, with which the SCC, together with other state institutions, has developed decisive basic requirements for cooperatively provided services - also beyond HPC. In order to accentuate not only technological developments but also the topics of research software and sustainability, a comprehensive state strategy is being worked out until 2032, Peter Castellaz lets it be known.
In her welcoming remarks, KIT Vice President for Digitization and Sustainability Kora Kristof is impressed by the community that has developed over a long period of time in the HPC environment, starting with the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) and continuing with the different centers at the Tier-2 (Gauss Alliance) and Tier-3 levels, nationally and in Baden-Württemberg. "What has been developed in HPC by KIT and other institutions at the state level has also helped shape developments nationally, and special thanks are due for that," Kora Kristof notes. In addition, KIT has combined high-performance computing with the topic of energy efficiency and achieved outstanding successes with it. Here, the German Computing Center Award 2017 for ForHLR II and 13th place on the international best list of the most energy-efficient computers for HoreKa speak for themselves. "And in the future, many interesting topics that shape sustainability will also occupy us in the HPC environment - this concerns sustainable buildings and infrastructures, the use of sustainable materials and resource conservation, as well as aspects of sustainable software" predicts Kora Kristof.
Transitioning to the technical presentations, Martin Frank, director of the SCC, characterized the HPC business as a mix of something very dynamic and something conservative. "The dynamic can be seen very clearly in the development of HPC systems over the last 40 years, the conservative is, for example, in the handling of very complex processes such as procurement and the secure operation of the infrastructure," Martin Frank concretizes in his welcoming speech, knowing that experience and innovation are the important poles in the HPC business that make the SCC an important player in national high-performance computing. "All this ensures that scientists are supported in the best possible way in their research with high-performance computers and research software."
In the first technical lecture, Eric Schnepf introduced the beginnings of high-performance computing in Karlsruhe and covered developments up to the present. He made his first IT experiences in the 1970s at the University of Karlsruhe with Algol programs, which he created on punched tape using a Siemens T100 teletype and ran on the Zuse Z 23. In the 80s, in addition to universal computers, he was able to familiarize himself with vector computers, on which it was possible to compute applications more accurately and faster. Eric Schnepf dates the beginning of the HPC era in Karlsruhe to May 1983, when a state vector computer, a Cyber 205, was installed and operated at the University Computing Center in Karlsruhe after previous tests on a similar machine at the University of Bochum. User support was provided by a team from the University of Karlsruhe and what was then the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center (KfK). "The procurement only came about because a large community worked very well together: university, KfK and industry partners" affirms Eric Schnepf in his presentation. In addition to many interesting technical excursions into the world of the computer systems installed at the university at that time, Eric Schnepf also gave examples of applications - for example, from climate research - and went into detail about the ODIN cooperation created between Siemens-Nixdorf and the university, which stands for Optimal Data Models and Algorithms for Engineering and Natural Sciences on High-Performance Computers. A milestone was the first TOP500 list of supercomputers, which appeared in 1993. The original handout shows the German list with the two first-placed S600/20 systems from Karlsruhe and Aachen. Eric Schnepf rounded off his presentation with an overview slide of the most important HPC systems of the last 40 years in Karlsruhe, placing them in the borderlines of the TOP500 (rank 1 .. rank 500). "From Cyber 205 (1983) to HoreKa (2023), that's eight powers of ten performance increase, so on average every 10 years factor 100 acceleration. I think that's something to be proud of," says Eric Schnepf, appreciating the development at the HPC in Karlsruhe.
Klaus-Peter Mickel, physicist and former director of the SCC, was already working as a programmer for the IBM machines at the Computing Center of the Karlsruhe Research Center (FZK) at the end of the 1960s and also experienced and shaped the developments of the high-performance computing systems in Karlsruhe from the very beginning. When he accepted a position at the Karlsruhe Computing Center in 1970, he took over the supervision of university employees who wanted to use the FZK machines. After various professional stations, Klaus-Peter Mickel then took over the management of the computer center at the FZK in 1996. In his review of the years between 1966 and 1996, Klaus-Peter Mickel describes the intensive cooperation between the computer experts at the university and the FZK, which finally, starting in 1996, led to the planning of a sophisticated technical and organizational cooperation between the two scientific computer centers - the Virtual Computer Center Karlsruhe was founded. Virtual, yes, because it did not come to a joint computing center of both institutions at one location, as originally considered, but to an association with a legally secured cooperation agreement. There was a joint management committee and different architectural focuses on both sides, each with mutually contributed resources. The university focused on massively parallel computers and the FZK on vector computers, which were very powerful at the time. A dedicated data line connected the two computing centers over 10 km as the crow flies, reaching the respectable speed of 155 megabits per second at the time. Many positive effects were achieved by setting up the virtual data center. In addition to a high level of efficiency, because both sides did not have to maintain both architectures, there was a great benefit for the user groups because they had both architectures at their disposal.
In his lecture, Rudolf Lohner gave an intensive insight into the origins of the university's computing center and the associated development as well as the operation of the massively parallel computers in Karlsruhe, the so-called computing clusters. Rudolf Lohner worked for 20 years for the mathematics professors Alefeld and Kulisch, whom he credited as pioneers of the first hours and founders of the university computer center. He then moved from the Mathematics Institute to the Computing Center at the University of Karlsruhe in the 2000s and was an expert on energy efficiency in high-performance computing centers at the SCC until the end of his active career. In the mid-1990s, massively parallel computing clusters became increasingly common, and such systems have also been operated for research purposes at the university's computing center over the last few years, right up to the present day. Rudolf Lohner presented in an entertaining ramble not only the different cluster systems, but also some important projects and application scenarios. The spectrum ranges from the mathematical simulation of sailboat characteristics for the America's Cup, to the generation of precise weather forecasts, to the development of the institute's own cluster management systems. For the Karlsruhe High Performance Computer (HoreKa) operated today at the SCC and its predecessor systems ForHLR I and ForHLR II, Rudolf Lohner designed the extremely efficient energy and operating concept together with the HPC team. The associated new building was completed in 2015 and houses HPC systems that can be used throughout Germany at KIT's North Campus. A few months ago, the necessary structural and technical preparations were completed to make the building fit for future, even much more powerful computing systems with up to 2 megawatts of power consumption.
Following the exciting technical presentations, which highlighted the entire 40 years of HPC in Karlsruhe from various angles, guests were able to take part in guided tours of the HPC infrastructure as well as admire data center exhibits from the last 40 years in a specially designed exhibition room.
The SCC would like to thank the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg, the KIT Presidium, all those involved in shaping and consistently developing 40 years of HPC in Karlsruhe, as well as the organization team of this festive colloquium around Simon Raffeiner (see photo), and of course all its guests.
 
Achim Grindler
Photos: Markus Breig (KIT)

The new SCC News is online, including these topics: Helmholtz-Cloud – interconnected IT services for cutting-edge research; Carbon-free combustion: A look into the future; Mentoring program for female STEM Students – Warp4IT

Download SCC-News 1/2023
Dear reader,
the cloud remains trending. Increasingly services that were operated locally are moved to the cloud or they operate in the cloud from the very beginning. Not only in industry, also in scientific institutions the number of cloud applications continues to increase. Following suit, the Helmholtz Centres have started to build a common cloud (p. 8). Each centre contributes services and applications which are offered via a user-friendly portal. For the joint service and quality concept the centres intensively exchanged information to reach agreement on common procedures and standards. This is why, among other things, services for digital communication played an important role while developing the Helmholtz Cloud.
However, remote communication may not always be sufficient for collaborating effectively. People from SCC have started travelling and meeting again at international conferences (p. 15) or went to longer research stays all over the world. On page 16, we discuss research that was conducted by Thorsten Zirwes during a DAAD scholarship at the prestigious Stanford University, on the feasibility of achieving CO2-free combustion of ammonia in porous materials.
The spectrum of scientific cooperation and communication at KIT is immense. Junior research groups or mentoring programs bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Charlotte Debus and Sebastian Krumscheid (cover photo) started their new research groups at SCC (p. 22) and female scientists at SCC have set up a mentoring programme for female MINT students at KIT. The program involves overseeing computer science projects for female students and providing them with an understanding of what everyday scientific life entails (p. 18 and 23).
Enjoy reading the new issue of SCC-News
Martin Frank, Bernhard Neumair, Martin Nußbaumer, Achim Streit


Achim Grindler

After a successful pilot operation, the SCC has now set up the IT infrastructure for central version management with GitLab. The service "GitLab at KIT" can be used by all employees and students at KIT from the beginning of July 2023.

In software development, "git" has become the de facto standard as a tool for decentralized version management in recent years. Based on this, GitLab offers a web application for project management, documentation, bug tracking, build creation and deployment including continuous integration.
Possible application scenarios at KIT include courses on programming as well as software development in research (also RSE). In addition, the platform is also suitable for managing text-based documents, e.g. in the markup languages like LaTeX or Markdown.
After the discontinuation of SVN and a successful pilot operation of git.scc.kit.edu, the SCC has set up the cluster operation for the new central service "GitLab at KIT" in the last few months and now makes the development platform available for use by all KIT members.
Information about the features of the service and their possible uses can be found in the service description for the "GitLab at KIT" service.
However, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us using the contact information provided in the service description.

From 31.5-2.6.23, the SCC hosted the HPC Status Conference of the Gauss Alliance, which for the 12th time provided researchers with a platform for interdisciplinary exchange and networking in the field of high-performance computing in Germany.

SCC hosted the 12th annual status conference of the Gauss Alliance, which focused on sustainable computing and AI. In times of energy crises, climate change and the beginning of the Exascale era, HPC centers are facing numerous challenges. To reconcile the race towards ever larger and faster systems with the scarcity of resources, clever solutions are needed in both the hardware and software areas.
VP Prof. Kora Kristof addressed these tensions in her welcoming address and emphasized the importance of the SCC not only as an HPC provider for researchers at KIT, but also our role in the state network bwHPC and the national network NHR.
For the first keynote speech we welcomed Dr. Stefan Schenk from BASF, who focused on HPC applications in the chemical industry. Today, simulations have become an integral part of every economic field and are used everywhere from medical research to detergent development.
The BMBF-funded GreenHPC projects presented projects such as ESN4NW and WindHPC. They aim to create data centers directly where energy is produced: in wind turbines. The massive towers offer sufficient protection and storage space, the green energy is fed in directly and the height of the mast is utilized for the necessary cooling.
But the hardware sector is not the only area that is undergoing exciting changes. The software sector is likewise preparing for the Exascale era. The BMBF's so-called ScaleExa projects have set themselves the goal of developing scalable and innovative methods to be able to use future systems in a time and energy-efficient manner. The SCC is represented within the EXASIM project by the junior research group FiNE. The goal is to link the open source software OpenFOAM to the Ginkgo library via a special software layer which then enables OpenFOAM to run on GPUs. This shortens the computing time and thus saves energy.
With exciting new tools such as ChatGPT or Mindjourney, there is a gold-rush atmosphere in the AI sector. Driven by ever new fields of application, the AI research landscape is growing rapidly. Growing demand for computing resources coupled with the uncertain development of energy costs increases the need for collaborations between HPC providers and HPC users.  In the closing keynote speech on "AI in the age of exascale computing" our junior research group leader Dr. Charlotte Debus explored these and other questions that will be faced by the HPC and AI community in the coming years.


Dr. Jasmin Hörter

Propulate is a software that solves very general optimization problems using genetic algorithms. It is specifically designed for high-performance systems, easy to use and publicly available.

With Propulate, we provide a software for solving optimization problems that is especially adapted to the HPC setting. It is openly accessible and easy to use. Compared to a widely used competitor Propulate is faster - for a set of typical benchmarks at least an order of magnitude - and in some cases even more accurate. 
Propulate is inspired by biology, in particular by evolution, that is selection, recombination, and mutation. Propulate uses mechanisms inspired by biological evolution, such as selection, recombination, and mutation. Evolution begins with a population of solution candidates each with randomly initialized genes.  It’s an iterative process where the population at each iteration is called a generation. For each generation, the fitness of each candidate in the population is evaluated. The genes of the fittest candidates are incorporated in the next generation (see explanatory video). 
 
Like in nature, propulate does not wait for all compute units to finish evaluation of the current generation. Instead, the compute units communicate the currently available information and use that to breed the next candidate immediately. This avoids waiting idly for other units and in consequence a load imbalance. Each unit is responsible for the evaluation of a single candidate. The result is a fitness level belonging to the genes of that candidate, allowing to compare and rank the candidates. This information is sent to other compute units as it becomes available. When a unit is finished evaluating a candidate and communicating the resulting fitness, it breeds the candidate for the next generation using the fitness values of all the candidates it evaluated and received from other units so far.  
 
Propulate can be used for hyperparameter optimization and neural architecture search. It was already successfully applied for several accepted scientific publications. Applications include grid load forecasting, remote sensing, and structural molecular biology. 
 
Further Information:
 
Propulate Code Repository Explanatory video Paper Massively Parallel Genetic Optimization through Asynchronous Propagation of Populations
Contact at SCC: Dr. Marie Weiel, Oskar Taubert
Achim Grindler

As part of an internal KIT project to establish Research Software Engineering (RSE) at KIT, people interested in RSE meet for the first RSE workshop. More than 60 people participated in the afternoon of May 9, 2023.

Software has become a key component of scientific work, and there is hardly a research discipline today in which software does not have an important role. Therefore, research software must meet the same stringent requirements that researchers place on their data, samples, equipment and infrastructures. Software, like any other infrastructure, must be continuously developed, maintained and supported, sometimes for decades. Successful and sustainable software projects often rely on strong, thriving communities and always require long-term funding.
Other countries in Europe are already a step ahead of the German science system in this regard. The Netherlands eScience Centre already demanded in its strategy paper in 2019: "Research software must be treated on an equal footing with research data and publications at the policy level and in practice" [1]. The UK Software Sustainability Institute states simply: "Better Software, Better Research" [2].
Within the scope of the field of action "Digitization" as part of the KIT umbrella strategy "KIT 2025", an internal flagship project on research software and research software engineering was therefore initiated by the KIT Presidium, which started at the end of 2022. Under the leadership of the SCC and participation from the Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics (IAI) and the service units Legal Affairs (RECHT) and Innovation and Relations Management (IRM), various work packages were defined. One of them addresses the needs of the research software community as well as the establishment of a research software community at KIT. In order to promote the establishment of such a community, more than 60 people from KIT - across many scientific disciplines - participated in the first workshop on Research Software Engineering at KIT on May 9, 2023, in the Senate Hall at South Campus and intensively exchanged ideas.
The workshop was professionally organized by Heidi Seibold (heidiseibold.com/, twitter.com/HeidiBaya) and moderated. After short introductory presentations, participants discussed and worked on different questions such as "Which IT services for RSE would you like to use?" or "What do you expect to get from an RSE@KIT community?" to "What can you contribute to an RSE@KIT community?". The answers to these questions were collected collaboratively in a group brainstorming session on pinboards, weighted together by all participants and finally presented. The program was concluded by eight so-called lightning talks from among the participants, which provided interesting and exciting insights into the development of research software engineering at KIT and beyond. The participants had the opportunity to discuss these and other topics of the workshop in detail during a pleasant conclusion of the event.
Parallel to the workshop, a new KIT-open mailing list for Research Software Engineering (RSE) at KIT named rse-announce@lists.kit.edu was established, in which interested KIT members are welcome to subscribe.
 
Prof. Dr. Achim Streit
 
 

As part of the gradual upgrade of the SAP system environment, the SAP ERP database is migrated to HANA

From 07 to 12 June 2023, the SAP ERP database will be migrated to HANA. During this period, SAP systems, including SAP Web Portal and User Portal (UP), will not be available.
HANA is SAP's current database technology and a prerequisite for using SAP's new generation software products such as S/4HANA. In addition to the development of the User Portal (UP) as the successor to the SAP Web Portal and the project to replace SRM with easyBANF, the database migration is another important step in updating the SAP system environment.
The migration to HANA does not initially have any significant changes for the users of the SAP systems. However, it is a necessary technical basis for future optimizations.


Martin Hengel

Reciting a rhyme about crown and digital methods, the project "Materialized Holiness" achieved 1st place in the poster slam at the 9th conference of the association "Digital Humanities in the German-speaking world" in Trier.

The poster of the interdisciplinary research team, consisting of experts from Jewish Studies (FU Berlin) and Research Data Management (SCC-DEM), presents both the research project of the BMBF-funded project Materialized Holiness and its digital methodology. The focus is on medieval, European Torah scrolls and their optical peculiarities in the typeface. In this project, SCC is developing a digital data infrastructure including a research data repository and tools for the controlled recording and editing of annotations. This digital approach offers multiple access points to new insights, linkages of contexts, and metaphysical analyses of Torah scrolls.
At the Poster Slam, contributors can present their poster within one minute to arouse interest in the audience to visit the poster in the subsequent poster session. There are no limits to creativity: A total of 22 contributions consisting of short videos, acting performances, imaginative presentations, and funny texts formed the colorful mix of this year's slam. With the title "Digital Scriptural Tradition: Ritually Pure Torah Scrolls in the Jewish Diaspora," the project team "Materialized Holiness" presented the associated poster as an imaginative rhyme, winning the Best Poster Slam Award with the loudest applause!
Contact: Laura Frank

A team of SCC scientists won an award for the best poster at the Materials Research Data Alliance Annual Meeting conducted from 21.02.23 to 23.02.23.

At the Materials Research Data Alliance (MaRDA) annual meeting, held Feb. 21-23, a team of SCC researchers received an award for the best poster.
The poster describes the tool Metadata Extractor and Schema Mapper, that automates metadata collection from instruments, enabling researchers to extract the metadata without manual effort and map it to a well-defined metadata schema. A browser based GUI facilitates the use of the tool for the researchers, requiring no programming expertise from them. The pilot version supports TIFF images generated by Scanning Electron Microscopes (SEM) manufactured by Zeiss.
This tool has been developed in the frame of the German Research Data Infrastructure for Materials Science NFDI-MatWerk, the NFFA-Europe Pilot (NEP), the Joint Lab "Integrated Model and Data-driven Materials Characterization", the SDL-Materials Science and the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) platform.
In the department Data Exploitation Methods Division (SCC-DEM) researchers develop novel methods and technologies for describing and exploring huge research data collections.
 
Contact: Reetu Elza Joseph
Link to poster: doi.org/10.21955/materialsopenres.1115090.1

From the end of March, new additional functions will be available in the User Portal (UP) for SAP applications

The User Portal (UP) is available to all KIT employees (except auxiliary staff) at up.scc.kit.edu and is the successor to the SAP Web Portal. Starting at the end of March, the following new functions/apps will be published in UP in addition to the already existing ones (My Profile, My Certificates):
Automated invoice receipt processing (AREB). Recording of person days Approval of person days My leave requests (corresponds to the absence overview in the SAP Web Portal, e.g. for submitting leave requests). The functions/apps are only displayed if the person has the appropriate authorization (e.g. only participants in the ESS see the "My leave requests" app). With the exception of the AREB, the functions/apps are offered in German and English. Further information on UP can be found in the service description. If you have any questions or problems regarding the use of UP, you can contact the SCC Service Desk.
Hengel, Martin (SCC)

14 Members of the SCC research groups CSMM, FiNE, RAI and SSPE attended the SIAM CSE conference in Amsterdam. The event was a huge success for both groups, with many interesting talks and interdisciplinary interactions taking place.

14 Members of the SCC research groups CSMM, FiNE, RAI and SSPE attended the SIAM CSE conference in Amsterdam. The event was a huge success for both groups, with many interesting talks and interdisciplinary interactions taking place. This experience has helped establish new connections to researchers across fields, which will benefit KIT in the long run.

The FiNE group was present with 8 group members at the SIAM CSE 23 conference. Overall, the group gave 8 talks in 7 sessions. Prof. Hartwig Anzt was also part of the early career panel (PD2) [1] which saw wide community engagement and tried to answer young scientists' concerns in the CSE community, including topics such as research software engineering vs science, conflict management, work-life balance, scientific vs industrial career, and more.
The talks given by FiNE were centered around various aspects of the Ginkgo portable sparse linear algebra framework [2] and reflected the community’s interest in the software.  The team provided two overview talks, one by Terry Cojean on research software engineering best practices [3], and one by Hartwig Anzt giving a historic overview of how the Ginkgo library evolved to answer the needs of the various scientific applications [4].  Other presentations detailed new functionalities developed for specific scientific applications.
The first area of focus was the batched iterative sparse solvers and preconditioners where Pratik Nayak presented the general scheme in a session dedicated to this new area of research [5]. Building on this, Yen-Chen Chen presented the specific case for tridiagonal and banded matrices with an implementation outperforming all existing vendor solutions [6]. An external speaker, Paul Lin from LBNL, USA, mentioned the use of Ginkgo’s batched iterative solvers to accelerate the XGC Plasma Fusion application [7].
The next area of focus was mixed-precision functionality, with Yu-Hsiang (Mike) Tsai’s presentation of Ginkgo’s performance portable Algebraic Multigrid (AMG) featuring multiple precision formats for the different levels [8]. Prof. Enrique S. Quintana-Orti from UPV, Spain, presented the performance and energy benefits of leveraging mixed precision at the example of the Ginkgo library’s mixed-precision functionality [9]. Another functionality that received large community interest is the new GPU-resident sparse direct methods presented by Tobias Ribizel, which were developed for the US Exascale Computing Project’s ExaSGD for power grid simulations [10]. Also targeting the acceleration of applications were two talks from the new BMBF ExaSim and PDExa projects by Gregor Olenik and Marcel Koch, respectively. ExaSim focuses on the acceleration of the OpenFOAM CFD software by using Ginkgo as a portable and efficient backend with promising early results [11]. PDExa aims at leveraging Ginkgo’s mixed-precision and batched functionalities to accelerate implicit or semi-implicit time stepping of hyperbolic-parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) discretized with discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods [12].

The Computational Science and Mathematical Methods (CSMM) research group was represented by four members, including Gayatri Caklovic, Pia Stammer, Steffen Schotthöfer, and Jasmin Hörter.
Gaya organized a minisymposium on Parallel in time methods [13,14] and presented her work on PInT for hyperbolic nonlinear equations [15]. Pia presented her research on Proton transport for cancer therapy, with a focus on dynamical low-rank approximations [16]. Steffen presented his research on Model order reduction with moment methods, with a focus on neural network-based minimal entropy closures [17].
Charlotte Debus from the junior research group RAI presented results for Predicting ILU(0) Effectiveness for Sparse Matrix Systems via Explainable Machine Learning and René Caspart from the SSPE-team talked about Sustainable Software Development on HPC Systems.
Overall, the conference was a success and we look forward to attending similar events and representing KIT in the future.
 
 
Achim Grindler

Thorsten Zirwes, a scientist at SCC, received the Distinguished Paper Award from the Combustion Institute for his collaboration on laminar flame research.

Every two years, the Combustion Institute selects outstanding contributions to the International Combustion Symposium that have made a particularly significant advance in our understanding of fundamental and applied combustion. This year, an international jury selected papers from thirteen different topics to be recognized with the Distinguished Paper Award.
Thorsten Zirwes, who has been studying combustion processes using high-performance computers at the SCC since 2016, has investigated ignition processes at low temperatures in cooperation with Peking University (PKU) and the Engler-Bunte Institute at KIT. These ignition processes play an important role in engine combustion, among other things, and can lead to engine damage if they are not suppressed. A better understanding of the physics of these processes is therefore important to develop more efficient engines for ships and other heavy transport vehicles. Thorsten Zirwes has developed simulation software that can model such ignition processes in high detail.  The paper on this topic, which Thorsten Zirwes co-authored, was awarded the Distinguished Paper Award this year in the category “laminar flames”.

Contact: Dr. Thorsten Zirwes
Source: https://www.combustioninstitute.org/resources/awards/distinguished-papers/
 
Achim Grindler
 

The new international online journal ing.grid is now accepting submissions addressing FAIR data management in engineering sciences. The interdisciplinary editorial team is looking forward to your contributions.

The international online journal ing.grid is now accepting submissions addressing FAIR data management in engineering sciences. With an open access policy, the journal bridges a gap in the field, offering a platform and recognition for sound scientific practice in generating research data, developing reusable tools for processing that data and curating the data to make it findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR).
The editor-in-chief, Professor Peter F. Pelz, would like to invite all the interested community to bring forward their contributions related to the seven core topics of ing.grid: data literacy, data infrastructure, data governance, data economics, data ethics, data sets, and data management software.

More information: Editor-in-Chief Newsletter (Call for Papers Flyer).
 
Contact at SCC and member of the editorial team:Prof. Dr. Achim Streit

DFN-PKI will stop issuing server certificates at the end of the year. Therefore, new procedures for certificate issuance have to be implemented at KIT.

The DFN-PKI and therefore also the KIT-CA G2 will not generate any new server certificates after 30.12.2022. All certificates issued up to that date will keep their validity until the end of validity specified in the certificate.
At KIT, there will be two new possibilities to obtain globally valid x509 certificates in the future:
Let's Encrypt with KIT-specific DNS plugin (https://docs.ca.kit.edu/acme4netvs/en/) GÉANT Trusted Certificate Services (the official successor service of the DFN-PKI) However, the SCC recommends that the affected service operators switch to certificates from Let's Encrypt as soon as possible and automate the process for this.
The use of GÉANT TCS is currently not yet usable for various reasons and is therefore not currently recommended. In 2023, however, the SCC will also provide a process for GÉANT TCS and document it at www.ca.kit.edu.
Last year, the SCC provided detailed information about this changeover and the planned procedure in the IT expert group [1][2]. In addition, affected certificate holders were informed directly by mail in order to be able to take action at an early stage.
For further support, the CERT team has offered several consultation hours for interested parties to jointly clarify questions that have appeared and problems with the implementation of the SCC-recommended solution with Let's Encrypt.
Noch bis zum 15.12.2022 können Serverzertifikate nach dem bisherigen Verfahren. beantragt und bis Ende 2023 genutzt werden. Damit ist die Umstellung durch Dienstbetreibende auf das neue Verfahren erst im Laufe des kommenden Jahres 2023 erforderlich.
Server certificates can be applied for using the previous procedure until December 15, 2022, and used until the end of 2023. This means that service providers will not have to switch to the new procedure until the coming year 2023.
[1] https://www.ca.kit.edu/downloads/018c9d1dc502dc123ca7a1b63a19f01c9b143de800ddc8f30e19c0e69a5d204f.pdf
[2] https://www.ca.kit.edu/downloads/fc91dd1b222da5bd902063ce3f5eb1ef9a6b14e908e60189ea7328bfaf802a51.pdf

The EOSC symposium 2022 shows progress and readiness of the European Open Science Cloud and contributions from SCC.

The EOSC Symposium provides a forum for researchers, research communities, Horizon Europe projects, cluster projects, digital and research infrastructures, policy makers and many other stakeholder groups who are working together on the co-creation of the European Open Science Cloud. From 14-17 November over 400 participants attended more than 60 sessions at the symposium in Prague, during which direction and activities of projects that are building the federated research infrastructure for Europe were presented and discussed. SCC is partner of several key constituting projects and represents KIT as member in the EOSC Association.
For the project EOSC Future, SCC delivered presentations in several sessions e.g., in the session ‘Implementing the EOSC Interoperability Framework’, and delivered to reports of the EOSC synergy, EOSC-Pillar, DICE and EGI-ACE projects. Taking place in parallel to the symposium, SCC was represented at the assembly of the EUDAT CDI council.
Do you want to (re)visit a particular session or discussion? All EOSC Symposium 2022 session presentations have been added to the session descriptions in the Agenda Page. The plenary session recordings can be found on the Home Page of the Symposium.


Jos van Wezel

Thorsten Zirwes, scientist at SCC, receives the Blanc & Fischer Innovation Award at the yearly meeting of the KIT Freundeskreis und Fördergesellschaft e.V.

The KIT Freundeskreis und Fördergesellschaft e. V. (KFG), annually awards the Blanc & Fischer Innovation Award together with the KIT to honor the best dissertations in the field of engineering. The winners are selected with an emphasis on high innovative potential of the methods developed during the doctorate, successful transfer into practice, and excellent oral and written communication. The award is sponsored for three years by the company Blanc & Fischer.
The Innovation Award, which was awarded for the first time this year, was presented to Thorsten Zirwes together with two other awardees. During his doctorate, Thorsten Zirwes developed new methods to speed up detailed simulations of chemically reacting flows on high-performance computers. His methods and simulation tools are currently used by more than thirty groups worldwide and are also used in industrial applications, such as the optimization of pollutant emissions in gas turbines. Thorsten Zirwes is currently conducting research at Stanford University as part of a DAAD funding program and attended the award ceremony online.

These are the award-winning topics:
Dr. Thorsten Zirwes: "Memory Effects in Premixed Flames: Unraveling Transient Flame Dynamics with the Flame Particle Tracking Method." Dr. Theresa Hanemann: "Usability and Limitations of Scaling Laws in Laser Powder Bed Fusion" Dr. Florian Stamer: "Dynamic Delivery Time Pricing in Variant-Rich Production: An Adaptive Approach Using Reinforcement Learning"  
More press information:
www.ciw.kit.edu/img/content/2022-11-28_BLANC%20FISCHER%20Innovationsprei.pdf www.moebelkultur.de/news/innovationspreis-fuer-herausragende-doktorarbeiten/  
Achim Grindler