The hydrological cycle does not appear to be that complicated at first sight. Sea water evaporates and then arrives back at the Earth’s surface in the form of precipitation. There, it evaporates again, infiltrates into the ground, and is transported by rivers back into the sea. This cycle is, however, influenced by complex interactions between the atmosphere, the surface of the Earth, soils, vegetation and groundwater. Scientists from Jülich and Bonn have developed a modelling platform, the Terrestrial Systems Modeling Platform (TSMP), which they use to simulate flows of terrestrial water, energy, and nutrients for large areas like parts of Germany or even Europe.

Read more

From our guest blogger Klaus Görgen. In mid April, the long-awaited dedicated PASCAL computer equipment arrived at IBG-3: one very powerful workstation, which will serve as our “mini supercomputer substitute”, plus 15, as well powerful, notebooks for the course participants. Tough only a single machine, the workstation will be mimicking a (very) small high performance computing cluster, where usually a number of so-called compute nodes are connected via a dedicated low-latency, high-bandwidth communication network plus special networking software.

Read more

I have just returned from Oman, where I accompanied Geoverbund ABC/J’s student’s excursion. Actually, it was now planned to put the registration form for PASCAL online. However, I could not do everything necessary for it before my departure. So it’s always good to have an official deadline that you share with colleagues and an unofficial “very-very-last-it-has-definitely-to-be-done-by-this-date” one.

Read more

My daily work for Geoverbund ABC/J, whose coordination office I manage, includes public relations. Qualification of young academics is also very important to the geoscientific network of RWTH Aachen University, the University of Cologne, the University of Bonn, and Forschungszentrum Jülich. That’s why I organize several trainings per year, including the Fall School of the HPSC TerrSys, Geoverbund ABC/J’s Competence Center for High-Performance Scientific Computing founded in 2011.

Read more