A new company has been founded, Society for Operating High-Performance Computers for Science and Industry (HWW) supercomputing centre as a top-level facility.
The centre is funded by a group of industrial and government partners and is installed in Stuttgart. Daimler-Benz Interservices (debis Systemhaus), founded as an IT-services provider, currently holds a 40 percent share. The State of Baden-Wuerttemberg holds 25 percent. The University of Stuttgart Computer Centre holds 25 percent, and Porsche holds 10 percent. HWW is open to other partners, from industry and academia.
The State of Baden-Wuerttemberg will initially invest 15 million DM (about 11 million US$) in the German Supercomputer Centre, the Federal Republic of Germany will match that amount. Then Baden-Wuerttemberg plans to invest another 20 million DM. The Wissenschaftsrat has already recommended that the Federal Republic of Germany should spend another 20 million DM.
As principal industrial members debis Systemhaus and Porsche will contribute computers and computing time worth 40 million DM (29 million US$). Debis Systemhaus is expected to bring considerable industrial applications expertise into the partnership and will market the computing power to small and medium enterprises and big industrial firms. Debis Systemhaus sees its market in serving small partners of Mercedes for example. Mercedes is now outsourcing whole parts as gears for example. The small companies now have to design, simulate these parts numerically and finally build them. As they are not so experienced in using HPC and numerical simulation, debis Systemhaus wants to be a partner of them.
Actually they use at University Stuttgart:
debis Systemhaus:
Porsche:
This is a very new situation in the HPC world that academia and industry are cooperating in supercomputing. First results will surely presented in the next report.