The seven federal states Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen and Schleswig-Holstein are partners in the North German Supercomupting Alliance (Norddeutscher Verbund zur Förderung des Hoch- und Höchstleistungsrechnens – HLRN) since 2001 (Brandenburg since 2012). The HLRN is a part of the HPC infrastructure in Germany. The HLRN alliance jointly operates a distributed supercomputer system at the two HLRN sites
The seven states have pooled their resources along with funds from the federal ministry of education and research (BMBF) and procure the HLRN compute systems.
HLRN systems are used mainly by scientists from universities and scientific institutions of the participating states and throughout Germany. Moreover the system is available for researcher from whole Germany. Research projects hold computing time after they have been successfully evaluated by the Scientific Board with respect to scientific criteria.
The HLRN alliance operates a transregional and interdisciplinary competence network which supports the users during the complete lifetime of a project. The network consists of experts in the following application areas of scientific computing: computational chemistry, Earth system sciences, informatics, life science, materials science, mathematics, and fluid dynamics.
The HLRN is administrated by the Administrative Board. Decisions in the Administrative Board can be prepared by proposals of its two permanent committees, the Scientific Board and the Technical Commission. The Scientific Board decides about the admission of project proposals for computing time, and the Technical Commission is responsible for the conceptional design and selection criteria for the present and future HLRN systems. The HLRN sites are members in the Gauß-Allianz and represent the HLRN alliance there.