High Performance Computing in Science and Engineering ' 06

The last two years have been great for high performance computing in Baden- W urttemberg and beyond. In July 2005, the new building for HLRS as well as Stuttgarts new NEC supercomputer which is still leading edge in G- many have been inaugurated. In these days, the SSC Karlsruhe is ?nalizing the installation of a very large high performance system complex from HP, built from hundreds of Intel Itanium processors and more than three th- sand AMD Opteron cores. Additionally, the fast network connection with a bandwidth of 40Gbit/s and thus one of the ?rst installations of this kind in Germany brings the machine rooms of HLRS and SSC Karlsruhe very close together. With the investment of more than 60 Million Euro, we as the users of such a valuable infrastructure are not only thankful to science managers and politicians, but also to the people running these components as part of their daily business, on a 24-7 level. Sinceabout18months,therearelotsofactivitiesonallscienti?c,advisory, and political levels to decide if Germany will install an even larger European supercomputer, where the hardware costs alone will be around 200 Million Euro for a ?ve year period. There are many good reasons to invest in such a program because beyond the infrastructure such a scienti?c research tool will attract the best brains to tackle the problems related to the software and methodology challenges.