NIC Symposium 2012 - proceedings : 25 years HLRZ / NIC, 7 - 8 February 2012, Jülich, Germany

Since 25 years the John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC), the former “Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum”, plays a pioneering role in supporting research in computational science at the fore-front, by giving large grants of computer time to carefully selected research projects. The scope of these projects ranges from fundamental aspects of physics, such as the physics of elementary particles and nuclear physics, astrophysics, statistical physics and physics of condensed matter, computational chemistry and life sciences, to more applied areas of research, such as the modelling of processes in the atmosphere, materials science, fluid dynamics applications in engineering, etc. Use of the supercomputer resources that the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) provides for these research projects hence has an important impact both on the progress of basic science and on the needs of the society, e.g. by progress made for better materials in research addressing the needs of energy supply information technologies, or for applications in medicine, for instance. The research projects that are funded by computer time grants on the JUGENE and JUROPA supercomputers of the JSC are selected by a peer review process, managed by a panel in which leading scientists from several European countries participate. Scientific excellence is the sole criterion which controls the ranking of the projects in all these different fields mentioned above. The present book, which appears in the framework of the biannual NIC Symposia series, continues a tradition started 10 years ago, to present selected highlights of this research to a broader audience. Due to space restrictions, only a small number of the research projects that are carried out at the NIC can be presented in this way. Projects that stand out as particularly excellent are nominated as “John von Neumann Excellence Project” by the review board. In 2010 this award was given to A. Muramatsu (Stuttgart) for his project on “Quantum Monte Carlo studies of strongly correlated systems”