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 Stuttgart’s 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.
