Engaging science and productive exchange: The NHR Conference 2025 in Göttingen
NHR Conference: What it’s all about
This year, the third annual NHR Conference was held at the University of Göttingen, offering a warm and welcoming atmosphere full of engaging science topics and networking opportunities. The event rotates annually among the nine centers of the NHR Alliance, bringing together users and providers of computing resources in Germany. From September 22 to 25, the NHR-Nord@Göttingen had the honor of hosting the conference this time, and they were outstanding hosts!
The focus topics of this year’s conference were “AI in Social Sciences and Humanities,” “Life Sciences,” and “Data Management and Storage,” again separating the event into two parts: September 22 and 23 focused entirely on the scientific aspect and featured presentations by various keynote speakers. The remaining two days provided opportunities for discussion, networking, and more specific coaching during workshop sessions.
NHR@FAU Contributions
Of course, the NHR@FAU also contributed in various ways to the event. For example our PhD students were actively involved in the scientific program:
- Aditya Ujeniya spoke on “Cluster-wide continuous regression testing and system characterization using benchmarks.”
- Jorge Antonio Amador Balderas talked about “Computer-assisted Molecular Modelling and Dynamics can Explain how Glu35 and Pro240 hSMUG1 Mutants Differently Affect Excision of Uracil and 5-Hydroxymethyluracil from Single-stranded DNA.”
In addition, Jan Eitzinger, our Software and Tools Lead, presented our ClusterCockpit monitoring framework in the moderated plenary session “NHR for Users.”
Our liaison scientists also prepared two specialized talks:
- Marius Trollmann (Computational Biology) covered “Decoding pKa Shifts in Lipid Nanoparticles Through Constant-pH Simulations.”Armine
- Garibyan (Digital Linguistics) presented a talk titled “Writing Collocation Dictionary Entries with Large Language Models – Challenges and Opportunities.”
Additional Highlights and Conclusion
Another highlight on the agenda was the network meeting of the Women In HPC (WHPC), whose NHR chapter was co-founded by Ayesha Afzal from NHR@FAU.
The interesting conference concluded with a lively networking event at the ultra-modern supercomputing center at GWDG, which houses clusters of the NHR‑Nord@Göttingen. Once again, we felt very welcome as guests at another university and want to thank the organizers and the NHR Alliance for the smooth organization and the great insights. See you next year!
