NIC Symposium 2018

It is an important tradition that the John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) at the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) holds biennial symposia, accompanied by proceedings volumes. The present meeting, held on February 22 and 23, 2018, is the 9$^{th}$ NIC symposium in this century; founded in 1987, held similar meetings in a somewhat different format. Last autumn the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) hosted the 30$^{th}$ anniversary celebration of the HLRZ and NIC. the event provided a welcome opportunity to look back at some achievements and highlights made possible on high-performance computers in recent years. One purpose of the NIC symposium as well as the proceedings books is to disseminate the knowledge about the type of researach that is possible by using supercomputers efficiently. It is only about 40 years ago, that both supercomputers and personal computers became available to scientists; up to that time, even a big research centre with thousands of employees could only provide a single large main frame computer to be shared by all users for all the numerical computations and simulations they did wish to make. Such a mainframe computer despite its investment cost (at least 10 million German Mark at that time) and space that is needed falls short in computing speed and storage size by many orders of magnitude in comparison with any simple laptop today. [...