Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing is a member of the state-wide competence network HPC.NRW. The mission of HPC.NRW is to drastically improve the HPC-Support, software environment, cluster operation, and structured access to HPC resources. PC² is coordinating and organizing the work on the software environment and computer operation, which forms one of the four work packages in HPC.NRW. The coordinator of the work package is Robert Schade.

Noteworthy activities of PC² in HPC.NRW include:

• coordination of work package 3 (software environment and cluster operation)
• efforts for harmonization of the software environment:
  • setup of data collection mechanisms and data analysis of HPC-software usage in NRW
  • coordination of best-practice guides and recommendations for computer operation
• co-organization of the HPC-Admindays NRW
• promotion of competence network for cluster operation
• coordination of software demand analysis and software acquisition (state-level licensing)
• HPC-courses and application/research-speccific events (e.g. "International Winterschool on electronic structure calculations 2020", "Cray Optimization Workshop", "Best practices in scientific computing", "Intel HPC Software Workshop" )
• HPC support, especially for chemistry- and- physics-related topics
• online tutorials in HPC-Wiki (see https://hpc-wiki.info/hpc/Category:Tutorials)
• organization and hosting of the NRW-wide user survey
• lead in the development of integrated profiling and performance monitoring tools (job-specific monitoring)
• setup of JARDS (Joint application, review and dispatch system) in Paderborn and support for other sites
• efforts in harmonizing of project categories, compute time proposals, reviews, accounting, and reporting