Cooperations

 bwFDM

As one of the oldest initiatives for research data management (RDM) at state level, bwFDM looks back on a history spanning more than twelve years of development and success.

The current state initiative, bwFDM, has been funded by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Arts (MWK) since May 2023 and is part of THE LÄND. It emerged from its predecessor projects: bwFDM-Communities, bwFDM-Info I, bwFDM Info II and bw2FDM.

bwFDM’s current foci are:

  • RDM-related networking in Baden-Württemberg via the AK FDM, the bwFDM Forum and FDM Staff Week
  • RDM-related networking beyond Baden-Württemberg via the NFDI and with other state and RDM initiatives
  • Management/hosting, advancement and editorial leadership of the information platform forschungsdaten.info
  • Design, provision, management, advancement and hybrid implementation of the Certificate of Advanced Studies in Research Data Management (CAS FDM, German only Website)
  • Organisation of the biennial conference series E-Science-Tage
  • Provision of consultation-related services, including a state-wide helpdesk with a ticketing system and a knowledge base
  • Provision of tailored training courses (upon request) and train-the-trainer workshops
  • Coordination and support for the design, development and implementation of the research data strategy for the State of Baden-Württemberg (published in German)

bwFDM is guided by the principles of open science, which means they place great importance on the reusability of the materials and resources they produce, as well as on transparency in their communication and collaboration.

 bwRSE4HPC 

Are you in need of help with parallelizing your software? Do you want to get your code running on HPC clusters or supercomputers but just don’t have the expertise and/or time to accomplish that? Or perhaps you want to test out a new method but don’t want to overhaul your entire codebase? If so, bwRSE4HPC is here to help!

The bwRSE4HPC team provides free research software engineering (RSE) services to researchers interested in the high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure across Baden-Württemberg. bwRSE4HPC is a joint project of the Scientific Computing Center (SCC) at KIT and the Scientific Software Center (SSC) at Heidelberg University funded by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Arts (MWK).

As datasets grow, analysis and simulations become more complex, efficient software becomes increasingly important. Yet researchers often lack the resources to adapt their code for HPC clusters — and that's where  bwRSE4HPC can help!
They work together with you for up to six months to optimize your software for HPC systems.

The scope of bwRSE4HPC is not just limited to improving performance on HPC machines. Other project ideas can include:

  • Enabling distributed computing to run your code on multiple CPUs or GPUs
  • Porting existing CPU code to GPU with CUDA or ROCm
  • Developing prototypes to test new methods
  • Creating a portable build system for your software
  • Improving the user experience of your software
  • Binding your program to high-level languages such as Python, Julia etc.

Projects with a duration ranging from a few weeks up to a maximum of six months can be offered free of charge to users of the bwHPC infrastructure – subject to available capacity. They are also happy to support smaller, well-defined requests – such as advice on parallelization or assistance with build systems.
More extensive projects may be possible through joint third-party funding.

If this sounds like the right initiative for you, and you have questions, ideas, or potential collaboration projects, please get in touch via their website or email.