Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, dear friends of artificial intelligence and

all its applications, dear researchers who use artificial intelligence and want to promote

artificial intelligence, I am happy to welcome you all to our HPC coffee today on the topic of

Bavaria AI resources and support for AI research in Bavaria.

Other formal things which are not really relevant for doing research on those machines, but which may be

irrelevant for you to understand how is the program structured and what are the basic committees and

organizations which are involved in that. A warm welcome to my colleagues from LRC. I'm happy to

welcome one of the members of the AI research group from LRC, Mr. Geisler, who found its way to

the north. Thanks for coming. And I would like to welcome also the colleagues from the group of

Nikolai Hammer in Garching. Nikolai Hammer is working together with us to establish this program,

especially in context of user support and branding. So he has a very well established research and

support and user support group in the context of AI at LRC Garching and my colleagues here at our

Center for National High Performance Computing. They have teamed up with our friends in Munich to

provide unique and unified support infrastructure also for the hardware infrastructure. For those of

you who do not know us, Leibniz Supercomputing Center and Erlangen National Center for High

Performance Computing. So there is a strong link or has been a strong link between Erlangen and

Garching in terms of high performance computing for many decades. So the Erlangen Regional

Computing Center where when I was heading the HPC group there, closely collaborated already with

people from LRC set in Garching on high performance computing, doing procurement, doing user

support and things like that. And now we are going to extend that collaboration towards AI,

providing a base infrastructure for AI research at Bavarian universities. So just a word about our

center here, Erlangen National Center for High Performance Computing. So as I mentioned, I was

heading the HPC group of RRZE. So some of you may already know me and us, especially Georg Hager,

from the early days of our activities here. In 2021, Erlangen received or started a National

Center for High Performance Computing. So this is one out of nine National Centers for High

Performance Computing at German universities. We deliver our services within that program to all

researchers in Germany through an application based process, and we receive long term funding on

that. So basically, we have grown out of the Erlangen Regional Computing Center, now built a

separate center, which is closely collaborating with RRZE, but which is dedicated to HPC, AI and

large data. So this is the background basically. So we are still in the RRZE, we are closely

collaborating here. So we are sitting in the RRZE, but we are looking forward to a new HPC and AI

Center for the State of Bavaria, which will be built, started hopefully next year, someone,

and we hope that we can go move into that building in 2030. So this is about the background.

Goal message is that there are teams, infrastructures in Karginger, Erlangen,

which know about HPC, which know about AI, and which are now building up a Bavarian resource for

all researchers and Bavarian universities in the context of AI. As I mentioned, we will focus on

this AI infrastructure for researchers in Bavaria in this talk. However, both LRZE and we have also

other funding streams like this national funding stream, LRZE, a CAU Center for Supercomputing

funding stream where they provide extreme scale computers on a European level. So once your needs

for training resources, for HPC resources exceed Bianca infrastructure, then you may go to LRZE

or us and submit a proposal to get access to even more powerful infrastructures which are funded

on a national or European scale. So this is the background, but today we will focus only on this

base infrastructure for research in Bavaria. So actually I had a presentation about AI research

in Bavaria almost a year ago, also in the HPC Cafe, where we did already talk about

Bianca-E, where we laid out the basic ideas. And I would like to start with this original idea of

Bianca-E and first tell you where are we now, what is the status of the program. Then I would

like to give you an overview over our hardware which we have now established and which is

operational. Then a short excursion to our website because this is important. You can apply for

getting access to this research infrastructure at our website. We set up a simple form which should

take you less than 10 minutes to fill and submit. Last but not least, I would like to introduce also