
€260m HPC supercomputer centre for Bavaria

The German Science Minister has approved construction of a €260m high performance computing centre in Erlangen, northern Bavaria.
The HPC centre will be a sister facility to one in Liebniz and marks over €1.5bn of investment for the modernization of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU).
“This project of the century catapults FAU into the top league in terms of computing infrastructure and investments,” said Science Minister Markus Blume. “ With the new high-performance data centre in Franconia, we let a second Bavarian IT heart beat next to the Leibniz data centre in Garching. And we are breaking new ground in data processing. Networking is the keyword here: all universities and all disciplines – from the humanities to quantum research – benefit from the new outstanding infrastructure.”
“I am pleased that we can also set the course for the strategic further development of the Friedrich-Alexander-University with this new building. We are creating an IT competence and innovation centre that will be integrated into national supply and research structures beyond the Nuremberg-Erlangen-Fürth science area,” said Building Minister Christian Bernreiter.
“Top research is increasingly dependent on being able to process immense amounts of data at top speed – and this applies not only to engineering sciences, but also wherever artificial intelligence is used, whether in medicine, geosciences or certain humanities subjects. The new high-performance computing centre will once again drastically catapult research performance at the science location in Northern Bavaria,” said FAU President Prof. Dr. Joachim Hornegger
The federal and state governments are funding the hardware, operating costs and personnel costs of the network partners for an initial period of ten years (2021-2030).
