About PC²

The Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, PC², is a scientific institute of Paderborn University, Germany. Our mission is to advance interdisciplinary research in parallel and distributed computing with innovative computer systems. We operate several high-performance cluster systems with tens of thousands of cores to support researchers from computational sciences at Paderborn University and North Rhine-Westfalia with HPC services.

In cooperations with scientists from Paderborn University and third party-funded research projects we specialize in three areas:

  • Provisioning of HPC infrastructure and services for computational sciences, where our main users are coming from our university's profile areas "Optoelectronics and photonics" and "Lightweight design with hybrid systems" (material sciences).
  • Development of new methods for HPC simulation codes and contribution of these codes to widely used open source codes (e.g., CP2K, ls1 MarDyn, ms2, QuantumESPRESSO, ADOL-C).
  • Computing systems research for energy-efficient high-performance computing with an emphasis on heterogeneous and accelerated computing with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Manycore architectures.

We leverage the synergies of this special combination of services and research to satisfy the needs of computational sciences while addressing the big challenges in computing systems research: energy-efficiency, scalability and programmability.