With this lighthouse project of outstanding importance for the future of Berlin as a research location, the partners want to create a regionally anchored and at the same time internationally competitive infrastructure that enables high-performance, cross-institutional and data-supported cutting-edge research. The merger will effectively complement the national high-performance infrastructure at ZIB. The partners agree that complex scientific simulations and the use of artificial intelligence in particular require innovative, high-performance data infrastructures. Planning and using resources and infrastructure together is a particularly sustainable approach.

As a first step, it is planned to build a new data center for outstanding research at the HZB site in Berlin-Adlershof in cooperation with the ZIB. HZB and ZIB have been in an intensive planning process for a year and want to implement the first stage of the computing center as quickly as possible. In the future, the computing capacity is to be expanded to up to 5 megawatts through a new building.

In the next step, the partners will jointly examine possible financing methods, management models and usage scenarios. These are to lead to a detailed cooperation agreement that will ensure long-term access and operation of the data center across all institutions.

Contact

• Ricarda Keenan, Head of Sharing Resources at Berlin University Alliance, Email: ricarda.keenan@berlin-university-alliance.de