Sunday, November 23, 2025

First collaborative research center in educational sciences

DFG approves new Collaborative Research Center on educational equity / Funding for three natural science CRC Transregios at Goethe University extended

Goethe University Frankfurt

Goethe University President Prof. Enrico Schleiff congratulated the researchers on their successful proposal: “A new Collaborative Research Centre is fantastic news for Goethe University – and in this particular case, for educational equity in Germany. I am fully aware of how much energy, creativity, and perseverance are required to prepare such a major project, and the result shows that the effort was definitely worth it. There is an urgent need to explore why educational opportunities in Germany are still not distributed fairly. I wish everyone involved continued success with their exciting and important research. The fact that three extensions for our Transregios have been approved confirms the quality of our research in the natural sciences and mathematics and strengthens our research capabilities within the Rhine-Main Universities alliance.”

For the past 50 years, opportunities to participate in education have continued to expand. At the same time, significant inequalities persist in terms of who benefits from these opportunities and how. Children and young people from families with limited educational resources, from migrant backgrounds, and those with disabilities and/or special educational needs are still not adequately reached. This inconsistency within the democratic promise of equal opportunity continues to erode trust in educational institutions.

The new Collaborative Research Center [in:just] 1750 at Goethe University Frankfurt will investigate the causes and contexts behind the persistent inequality in Germany’s educational system. To support this work, the CRC will receive a total of €14 million over the next three years and nine months. 31 researchers from diverse disciplines including the educational sciences, sociology, philosophy, political science, law, human geography, and computer science have come together to form an interdisciplinary consortium led by the educational sciences. The spokespersons for the project are Prof. Merle Hummrich and Prof. Vera Moser, both from Goethe University’s Faculty of Educational Sciences. Prof. Merle Hummrich focuses on youth and schools, while Prof. Vera Moser, holding the Kathrin and Stefan Quandt Foundation Professorship, works in the field of inclusion research.

The center will adopt multiple perspectives to examine institutionalized processes of participation and recognition involving children, adolescents, and young adults within the German education system. Research topics include teaching in multilingual contexts or addressing students perceived having “behavioral disorders,” procedures of caretaking of children and adolescents as well as unaccompanied minor refugees by youth welfare, the impact of gentrification on the quality of regional educational opportunities, the influence of parents’ advocacy power, and computer-based decision-making to be analyzed comparatively in education and legal systems. The program also encompasses international comparative research on the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and on children’s rights, also within intersectional perspectives.

“Within significant societal crises and challenges that we are facing today, we are deeply grateful for this tremendous opportunity to study the upbringing of children and young people in our education system” says Prof. Merle Hummrich. “I find it particularly important to examine how human rights norms impact the daily lives of young people,” emphasizes inclusion expert Prof. Vera Moser.

Collaborative Research Centres-Transregios Extended

The DFG also announced the continuation of the following CRC-Transregios, in which researchers from Goethe University play a significant role:

How can highly complex geometric and arithmetic structures be described using simpler spaces? This question is the focus of TRR 326 “Geometry and Arithmetic of Uniformized Structures (GAUS),” which is now entering its second funding phase with a budget of €13.7 million. Mathematicians are applying the principle of mathematical “uniformization,” which creates order within complexity: Hard-to-grasp spaces from modern geometry and arithmetic are replaced by simpler models without altering their essential form. A clear example is the surface of a life ring (an elliptic curve): An ant living on this surface can travel either lengthwise or crosswise in a loop, always returning to its starting point. This behavior is reflected in uniformization, represented by a plane covered with a grid – the grid lines illustrate the ant’s travel routes extended infinitely. This transformation reveals hidden symmetries, making questions at the intersection of geometry and numbers theory manageable and answerable.Participating institutions include Goethe University Frankfurt as the lead university, Technical University Darmstadt, and Heidelberg University. Partners include Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz – which, along with Frankfurt and Darmstadt, forms the Rhine-Main Universities (RMU) alliance – as well as Leibniz University Hannover and the University of Münster.

Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Jakob Stix (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Co-Spokespersons: Prof. Jan Hendrik Bruinier (TU Darmstadt), Prof. Alexander Schmidt (Heidelberg University)
Website: https://crc326gaus.de/

Matter under such extreme conditions that even protons and neutrons break apart – this is the focus of TRR 211 “Strong-Interaction Matter under Extreme Conditions,” which has been approved for its third funding phase. The participating researchers are investigating what happens when matter is heated and compressed to such an extent that its fundamental building blocks – quarks and gluons – are released. These states can be created for fractions of a second in particle accelerators and occur in space, for example, during the merger of neutron stars. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the strong nuclear force, which holds everything together at its core. Alongside Goethe University Frankfurt, TU Darmstadt and Bielefeld University are also involved.

Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Sören Schlichting (Bielefeld University)
Co-Spokespersons: Prof. Dr. Hannah Elfner (Goethe University Frankfurt), Prof. Dr. Guy Moore (TU Darmstadt)

Website: https://crc-tr211.org/

The study of a zone in the atmosphere that separates the lower “weather layer” (troposphere) from the stratosphere above, known as the tropopause region, is the research topic of TRR 301 “The Tropopause Region in a Changing Atmosphere.” The research focuses on the physical and chemical processes in this region and their influence on planetary circulation and climate. As part of TRR 301, researchers from Goethe University participated in the aircraft measurement campaign on oxidation processes in the atmosphere (CAFE), which helped explain how the Amazon rainforest functions as a “cloud machine.” The main locations of TRR 301 are Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Goethe University Frankfurt. Additional partners include Technical University Darmstadt, LMU Munich, the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Forschungszentrum Jülich, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Weßling.

Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Peter Hoor, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, hoor@uni-mainz.de
Co-Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Joachim Curtius, Goethe University Frankfurt, curtius@iau.uni-frankfurt.de

Website: https://tpchange.de/

The Amazon rainforest as a cloud machine: How thunderstorms and plant transpiration produce condensation nuclei: https://aktuelles.uni-frankfurt.de/english/the-amazon-rainforest-as-a-cloud-machine-how-thunderstorms-and-plant-transpiration-produce-condensation-nuclei/

DFG press release (in German):
https://www.dfg.de/de/service/presse/pressemitteilungen/2025/pressemitteilung-nr-37

Uniform reference system for lightweight construction methods

Comparison of mechanical and geometric properties for industry and development

Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Lightweight components are generally designed with computer-based methods before being manufactured. There are various common methodologies. Because they use different physical and mathematical descriptions, however, direct comparisons are difficult. Moreover, the highly complex computation methods limit them to low spatial resolutions. With their Stress-Guided Lightweight 3D Designs (SGLDBench) benchmark, the researchers have succeeded in overcoming these serious obstacles.

SGLDBench standardizes lightweight design methods

SGLDBench permits six reference strategies such as classical topology optimization, porous infill structures or lattice-based layouts to be applied to arbitrary components with user-defined boundary conditions and compared using 3D simulations. It incorporates such parameters as stiffness-to-weight, stress fields and deformability as well as information on how the component or structure is connected to or positioned in its surroundings. This enables users to create designs with different resolutions and material use while evaluating the mechanical and geometric characteristics.

The new benchmark has potential applications in many areas: for example, it enables testing of various design variants for hip implants followed by customized manufacturing. In the automotive and aerospace industries, the benchmark will also help to make parts even leaner. In those areas, weight savings lead to improved energy efficiency. At the same time, the structures must be designed to meet stringent safety standards in their ability to withstand shocks and vibrations.

Benchmark allows more than 100 million simulation elements

“With SGLDBench we have created a transparent benchmark for lightweight design,” says Rüdiger Westermann, Professor for Computer Graphics and Visualization at the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology. “That will not only help researchers with the classification of methods, but will also give companies a tool for reaching well-founded decisions in product development.” At present, SGLDBench can perform simulations with more than 100 million elements on an affordable desktop computer in much faster times than commercial products.”

Among the methods making this possible, the researchers used new approaches in particular for the efficient solution of large systems of equations for stress simulations and optimized them for conventional computer architectures.

Journal

Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization

DOI

10.1007/s00158-025-04127-3

Article Title

Efficient large-scale 3D topology optimization with matrix-free MATLAB code

ACM Gordon Bell Prize-winning team develops revolutionary simulation for tsunami prediction

Innovative “Digital Twin” yields Ten-Billion-Fold Speedup Over Existing State-of-the-Art Methods

Association for Computing Machinery

ACM Gordon Bell Prize Announced — image:
The digital twin developed by this year’s winning team enables real-time, data-driven tsunami forecasting with dynamic adaptivity to complex source behavior.
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Credit: Association for Computing Machinery

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, named an eight-member team drawn from US institutions as the winner of the 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their project, “Real-time Bayesian inference at extreme scale: A digital twin for tsunami early warning applied to the Cascadia subduction zone.” The ACM Gordon Bell Prize tracks the progress of parallel computing and rewards innovation in applying high-performance computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics.

Existing state-of-the art high-performance computing simulations for early tsunami warning are developed primarily through models which process seismic data. The drawbacks of these approaches include: 1) They do not allow for enough warning time, as destructive tsunami waves can arrive onshore in under ten minutes, and 2) They fail to capture the complexities of earthquake ruptures which cause the Tsunamis.

The Gordon Bell Prize-winning team created a far more predictive early warning framework by developing a full-physics Bayesian inversion framework—popularly called “digital twin.” A digital twin is a virtual simulation of a physical process (or object) that uses real-time data from sensors to match its physical counterpart. The digital twin developed by this year’s winning team enables real-time, data-driven tsunami forecasting with dynamic adaptivity to complex source behavior.

With this approach, they achieved the fastest time-to-solution of a partial differential equation (PDE)-based Bayesian inverse problem with 1 billion parameters in 0.2 seconds, a ten-billion-fold speedup over the existing state-of-the-art. This is the largest-to-date unstructured mesh finite element (FE) simulation with 55.5 trillion degrees of freedom (DOF) on 43,520 GPUs, with 92% weak and 79% strong parallel efficiencies in scaling over a 128× increase of GPUs on the full-scale El Capitan system—the world’s largest supercomputer.

The team simulated a Tsunami in an area in the Pacific Ocean called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which stretches 1000 km from northern California to British Columbia. This area has been eerily quiet for over 300 years—but is considered overdue for a magnitude 8.0–9.0 megathrust earthquake.

The members of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize-Winning team are Stefan Henneking, Sreeram Venkat, Milinda Fernando, and Omar Ghattas (all of The University of Texas at Austin); Veselin Dobrev, John Camier, Tzanio Kolev (all of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory); and Alice-Agnes Gabriel (University of California San Diego).

Honorable Mention
This year an Honorable Mention for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize was given to a 10-member team from ETH Zurich for their project “Ab-initio Quantum Transport with the GW Approximation, 42,240 Atoms, and Sustained Exascale Performance.” Team members include Nicolas Vetsch, Alexandros Nikolaos Ziogas, Alexander Maeder, Vincent Maillou, Anders Winka, Jiang Cao, Grzegorz Kwasniewski, Leonard Deutschle (also affiliated with NVIDIA), Torsten Hoefler, and Mathieu Luisier.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize was presented today during the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC25) in St. Louis, Missouri.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

About the ACM Gordon Bell Prize
The ACM Gordon Bell Prize is awarded each year to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. The purpose of this recognition is to track the progress over time of parallel computing, with particular emphasis on rewarding innovation in applying high-performance computing to applications in science. The prize is awarded for peak performance as well as special achievements in scalability and time-to-solution on important science and engineering problems and low price/performance. Financial support for the $10,000 awards is provided by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing.

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First-ever full Earth system simulation provides monumental new tool to understand climate change

Breakthrough in climate modelling integrates weather and climate processes with far greater precision than previous frameworks

Association for Computing Machinery

St. Louis, MO, November 20, 2025 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today presented a 26-member team with the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling in recognition of their project “Computing the Full Earth System at 1 km Resolution.” The award honors innovative contributions to parallel computing toward solving the global climate crisis.

Climate change is responsible for more extreme hurricanes, more destructive wildfires, severe droughts, and increased human disease, among other harmful outcomes. Experts warn that if carbon emissions are not significantly reduced within a few decades, the damage to the Earth’s ecosystem will be irreversible.

Among the most effective tools scientists have developed to understand climate change are digital simulations of the Earth. These simulations are produced by developing specific algorithms to run on the world’s most powerful supercomputers. But simulating how human activity influences the climate has been an extraordinarily difficult challenge. A mind-boggling number of variables need to be taken into consideration—such as the cycles of water, energy, and carbon, how those factors relate to each other, and how diverse physical, biological, and chemical processes interact over space and time. For these reasons, previous state-of-the-art simulations have not been able to achieve what is referred to as a “Full Earth System” simulation.

The Gordon Bell Climate Prize-winning team reached a landmark this year by being the first team ever to develop a Full Earth Simulation at 1 km (extremely high) Resolution. In their introduction, they explain, “We present the first-ever global simulation of the full Earth system at 1.25 km grid spacing, achieving highest time compression with an unseen number of degrees of freedom. Our model captures the flow of energy, water, and carbon through key components of the Earth system: atmosphere, ocean, and land. To achieve this landmark simulation, the team harnessed the power of 8192 GPUs on Alps and 4096 GPUs on JUPITER, two of the world’s largest GH200 superchip installations.”

The groundbreaking innovations the team employed to make the Full Earth Simulation possible include (1) exploiting functional parallelism by efficiently mapping components to specialized heterogeneous systems and (2) simplifying the implementation and optimization of an important component by separating its implementation in Fortran from the optimization details of the target architecture.

In the conclusion to their paper they write, “This has enormous and enduring potential to provide full global Earth system information on local scales about the implications of future warming for both people and eco-systems, information that otherwise would not exist.”

Team Members
The members of the team are: Alexandru Calotoiu, Torsten Hoefler, Yakup Budanaz, Pratyai Mazumder, Marcin Copik, and Benjamin Weber (all of ETH Zurich); Jan Frederik Engels, Hendryk Bockelmann, and Claudia Frauen (all of Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum), Dmitry Alexeev (NVIDIA), Daniel Klocke, René Redler, Reiner Schnur, Helmuth Haak, Luis Kornblueh, Cathy Hohenegger, and Bjorn Stevens (all of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology); Fatemeh Chegini (University of Hamburg), Manoel Römmer, Lars Hoffmann, Sabine Griessbach, Mathis Bode, and Andreas Herten (all of Forschungszentrum Jülich); as well as Jonathan Coles, Miguel Gila, and William Sawyer (all of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre).

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling was presented today at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC25), held in St. Louis, Missouri.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

About the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling
The ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling recognizes innovative parallel computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis. Climate scientists and software engineers are evaluated for the award based on the performance and innovation in their computational methods. A cash prize in the amount of $10,000 accompanies the award, which was conceived and funded by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high performance computing and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research. Recipients of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling will have their research published in The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA).

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