Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDG)

Computing power and storage capacity are of increasing importance in a growing number of scientific disciplines, including and especially in the life sciences. Due to advances in biotechnology and the successively increasing amount of data generated in this field, a highly efficient computing infrastructure for implementing these very methods is becoming increasingly important, in addition to methods of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

Data lakes have experienced increasing popularity for years and are being used in more and more institutions as central storage for all accumulating data, especially unstructured data. An unique selling point of a data lake is that data is stored in the respective raw format. This is intended to prevent information loss and thus increase the reusability of the data. Furthermore, a data lake at the GWDG provides means for data management and, thus, can also support researchers in complying with good scientific practice. 

The EU-funded project ”Open Forecast” is developing a generic platform for processing open, freely available data implementing automated data analysis pipelines and integrating high-performance computing ressources. Two use cases based on this platform are realised: smart cities and smart farming. In the first case, a complex meteorological 3D model is used to calculate forecasts of particulate matter pollution for the greater Stuttgart area. In the second case, forecasts for agriculture are generated based on satellite data from the Copernicus earth observation program.

The GMPG research programme is dedicated to investigating the History of the Max Planck Society. An integral part of the program is the mass digitization of files and the long-term preservation and provision of resulting research data. The project “Archival Cultural Heritage Online” was established to provide the necessary infrastructure to integrate the digitization workflow, a long-term archiving service and a virtual working environment. This article describes the underlying concept and the implemented service.

Cloud services, high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, computers with special accelerator cards? The selection of the optimal application and computing resource is a success factor for scientific simulations. In view of the heterogeneous infrastructure of modern data centers, this is often tricky. Learning the technical details is time-consuming. The aim of the cooperation project launched in 2016 between GWDG and the Simulation Science Center Clausthal-Göttingen is to automate the selection and provision of the resource.