Atomistic Simulation Center
Our offer provides researchers at German universities with free access to computing resources and support
Overview
What is the NHR Atomistic Simulation Center?

The NHR Alliance (Nationales Hochleistungsrechnen) bundles the resources and competencies of university high-performance computing and makes them available to scientists at German universities free of charge. The NHR Atomistic Simulation Center (NHR ASC) is an association of three NHR Centers that are especially dedicated to atomistic simluation and condensed-matter physics in general:
Available hardware
Massive compute resources
The computing systems of the three NHR centers in the NHR Atomistic Simulation Center are tailored for computations in atomistic simulations, quantum chemistry, solid-state physics, and condensed-matter physics in general. Examples are:
- fast interconnects for large parallel calculations for example for linear-scaling DFT,
- nodes with large main memory for example for quantum chemistry calculations,
- or GPUs for example for molecular dynamics simulations or machine learning training.
Have a look at the hardware of our three NHR centers:
Available software
Software for atomistic simulation
All systems of the NHR Atomistic Simulation Center have a wide array of software available for use, including examples such as
- Quantum Chemistry: GAUSSIAN, ORCA, GAMESS, TURBOMOLE, NWChem, and others
- Solid-State Physics: VASP, Quantum ESPRESSO, CP2K, SIESTA, GPAW, and others
- Molecular Dynamics: GROMACS, LAMMPS, Amber, NAMD, and others
Have a look at the software of our three NHR centers that can be found on their webpages:
PC² | Chemistry | PC² | Physics | NHR@FAU | NHR@ZIB
The scientific support is always happy to install additional programs or new versions for you.
Get started
The NHR Alliance offers several different project categories depending on your needs. Details about the project categories and access procedure can be find at →HPC Access
We would be happy to support you with a choice of a suitable project type and center for your needs of other questions. Simply contact us!
Scientific Support and In-Depth Scientific Consulting
The easiest way to get in touch with us is via atomistic-simulations(at)nhr-verein.de. (For other scientific areas have a look at the full list of the NHR application support.)
The scientific support in the NHR Alliance consists of post-doc level scientists that in addition to the scientific field also are experts in using high-performance computing systems.
We are happy to support you with
- getting access to computing resources and computing projects
- installing, configuring, and testing your programs and workflows
- support with problems and issues in scientific applications
- improving the efficiency/scalability of computational methods or developing new computational methods
- exploring new computing architectures for your workload
- organizing scientific workshops and other scientific events
- and much more...
The NHR Atomistic Simulation Center has teamed up with the CECAM node “Mathematics and Computation in Molecular Simulation” (DE-MMS) to promote the development and application of computational methods in atomistic and molecular simulation. We are organizing workshops, conferences, symposia, and events for the community.
We announce all our events via the nhr-announcement mailing list, which you can subscribe using this link