NHR Working Groups
Cross-center collaboration within the NHR Alliance advancing expertise, user support, efficiency, and innovation for the HPC research community
In the context of the NHR Alliance several joint initiatives of NHR centers led to the formation of joint working groups. Collaboration between two or more NHR centers offers numerous advantages. Joint efforts foster the sharing of expertise and best practices, allow broader user support and improve efficiency. Additionally, such partnerships also promote standardization and interoperability, ensuring that advancements benefit the broader research community.
Learn more about NHR working groups and their key focus areas:
In coordination with all NHR centers, we decided to use JARDS (Joint Application, Review and Dispatch Service) as the common software framework for computing time application submission and review, and to introduce a unified application form for a coordinated, NHR-wide review process based on standardized measures and metrics. The working group, led by RWTH Aachen University, has continuously further developed the framework, tailoring it to the needs of all NHR centers and regularly refining it to harmonize processes and improve user-friendliness.
Measuring, understanding and optimizing performance of application codes is of basic interest for all NHR centers and their users. The NHR PerfLab is a collaborative effort of all NHR centers to combine resources and activities around performance engineering (PE), code analysis, HPC computer architectures, and tools. It aims to further develop the broad expertise at the centers and make it accessible to the HPC user communities or other HPC centers. Central pillars are the PE Jour Fixe and the NHR PerfLab seminar. The bi-monthly PE Jour Fixe brings together experts from the NHR and other HPC centers to discuss experiences and new developments in performance-oriented user support. The monthly online NHR Perflab seminar is a series of public talks about
performance-related topics both from service and operational perspective but also in the context of new research findings.
The Public Relations Working Group of the NHR Alliance coordinates communication and outreach activities across the NHR centers. Its goal is to increase the visibility and understanding of high-performance computing and the work of NHR.
The group develops communication strategies, supports public relations, and helps organize events, publications, and online communication.
The topic of procuring computing infrastructure is of great importance to the NHR Alliance. For this reason, a working group has been formed, comprising staff from all NHR centers, who meet regularly to discuss completed and planned procurements at the centers, e.g., with regard to experiences with different providers, but also to ensure interoperability where appropriate.
The NHR-wide Security Working Group meets regularly, evaluates security incidents and countermeasures, and develops best practices as implementation proposals for the Operators Committee.
Training staff from all NHR centers is involved in this working group. In its bi-monthly meetings, this group discusses a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from course certification, registration, digital learning platforms, and data protection issues to modern methods of teaching, participant surveys, and dissemination. The working group maintains contact with local HPC networks of the German federal states in order to raise awareness of the concept of the NHR Alliance and its training offerings. It also coordinates and conducts training with other centers in Germany and internationally within the VI-HPS consortium.
Contact:
Dr. Kevin Lüdemann (NHR@Göttingen), Dr. Sebastian Kuckuk (NHR@FAU)