Until the end of 2011, a new building will be erected for the Institute for Applied Computer Science (IAI) and the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC). Total costs are estimated to amount to EUR 7 million. On Monday, April 26, 14 hrs, the groundbreaking ceremony will take place on KIT Campus North. Journalists are cordially invited.
On a net area of 3230 square meters, the three-storied building financed from federal funds will provide office areas for a total of 140 employees of both institutes, meeting rooms, a lecture hall for 100 persons, and a seminar room for 50 persons. The building is designed such that another two stories can be added in order to ensure an optimum use of the area.
“The Steinbuch Centre for Computing will use the new building in particular for the urgently required extension of its Grid Computing Centre Karlsruhe,” explains Klaus-Peter Mickel, Technical and Scientific Director of SCC. The Grid Computing Centre Karlsruhe (GridKa) is one of the eleven tier-1 nodes worldwide for the storage and analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at the European Research Center CERN in Geneva. Moreover, GridKa is planned to be extended to a leading national grid computing center in order to meet the requirements of other science disciplines, for example, systems biology.
Apart from the urgently required extension of the institute building, the Institute for Applied Computer Science considers the experiment hall of 250 square meters to be of primary importance. “Within the framework of our research activities for the use of regenerative energies, we will install and test energy stores and prototypical automation solutions for use in the geothermal energy sector,” underlines Professor Georg Bretthauer, Head of the IAI.
The energy concept of the institute building is based on the use of close-to-surface geothermal energy in connection with component activation for both heating and cooling purposes. Water-conducting pipelines in the concrete ceilings use the storage effect of concrete and ensure a comfortable temperature in the rooms. Energy is supplied by a heat pump that uses the groundwater that is available with nearly constant temperature throughout the year.
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