Press release: Brand new infrastructure for high-performance computing

No. 102 - 30.06.2021

University hands over new computing centre to GWDG for Göttingen, City of Science

Göttingen University handed over its largest new building project to date to its future users: after a symbolic handover of the keys, the Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDG) is now moving into the new joint computing centre for Göttingen City of Science on the North Campus. In addition to the University and the GWDG, the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) and the Max Planck Society are also involved. In future, the computer centre will provide all of these participating institutions with additional computing power and storage capacity for research, teaching, collaborative work, patient care and administration.

"The new data centre for Göttingen, City of Science, is another milestone in the success story of the Göttingen Campus," says University President Professor Metin Tolan. "We are investing in the future here: all scientific disciplines need powerful IT and information infrastructures these days, and demands in this area will continue to grow. Creating the perfect conditions for research and teaching to thrive here is one of our central tasks."

"As a joint institution of the University and the Max Planck Society, the GWDG continues to consistently ensure and develop a supply of information technology and computer power. And all of this right at the forefront of technology," says Professor Christian Griesinger, member of the Supervisory Board of the GWDG and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. "This is combined with excellent advice. This has the added advantage of benefiting a large number of Max Planck Institutes not just inside, but also outside Göttingen. In the new data centre, the Information Technology of the Göttingen Campus is now all packaged together in one place."

"This new building makes a clear, unequivocal announcement: make space for the coming together of scientific excellence on the Göttingen Campus! Together, all those involved have created a physical environment where synergies will flourish," says Professor Wolfgang Brück, Chair for the UMG Board of Directors. "With its enormous additional computing power and storage capacities, the data centre is the engine room, the heart, as it were, of the UMG's digitisation push for innovative, future-proof, cutting-edge university medicine in Göttingen. The data centre gives us the key to the future."

"We are delighted: the new data centre will provide an excellent basis for operating a digital infrastructure focussed on the future," said GWDG Managing Director Professor Ramin Yahyapour. "In terms of efficiency, security and the environment, we are breaking new ground here."

Since the beginning of 2018, the University had been constructing a building complex with a computing room and office space at Burckhardtweg 4. The cost of the first construction phase was around 38.7 million euros. The second construction phase began in April 2021 and includes the expansion of the office building and computer capacities as well as the construction of a lecture hall. In the future, the new computer centre will connect the joint infrastructures for high-performance computing, for artificial intelligence and Big Data applications, as well as long-term data archiving of the participating institutions with growing demands on the availability of data. Further synergies will result from the project: for example, the excess heat generated in the data centre by the computing power will be used to heat the greenhouses of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences being built across the street.