About
Labs is a small research-support unit at Goethe University Frankfurt. We sit within the university’s Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) and our job is, simply put, to help researchers do better computational science — faster, more reliably, more reproducibly.
What we are
We are not a single-discipline group and not a single-method group. We are problem solvers for computational science: a small team of experts who bring different skills to bear on whatever a researcher is trying to do.
In practice that has meant, on different days, helping a PhD student get their first MPI job to actually scale, packaging a niche bioinformatics tool as a cluster module so an entire group can use it, debugging numerical instability in a long-running simulation, code-reviewing a publication’s analysis pipeline, or sitting down with a researcher to design a reproducible workflow before a single line of code is written.
What we do
The work tends to fall into a few overlapping areas:
- Cluster & HPC support — accounts, software modules, job tuning, and troubleshooting on the university cluster.
- Research software engineering — code review, packaging, testing, and refactoring research code so it can outlive the project that started it.
- Containers & reproducibility — Apptainer / Singularity images, pinned environments, and pipelines (Snakemake / Nextflow) for reproducible analyses.
- Training & consultation — workshops, office hours, and one-on-one sessions for harder, project-specific questions.
- Software requests — adding well-behaved research software to the cluster so groups don’t have to maintain their own copies.
The list above is what we do most often, not the limit. If your problem is adjacent to any of these, please ask.
Method Labs in NHR Süd-West
Labs at Goethe Frankfurt is part of the Method Labs (MLabs) of NHR Süd-West (NHR@SW), the south-western node of the German National High-Performance Computing alliance. The official mission of the Method Labs in NHR@SW, as described in the NHR@SW concept paper, is to:
address central cross-cutting topics in HPC method development, including performance engineering, parallel programming, machine learning and AI, I/O and storage, energy efficiency, and data-intensive methods.
In the NHR@SW proposal, the Method Labs and their counterpart Simulation & Data Labs (SDLs) are described as offering
high-level technical expertise to the scientific community, develop[ing] and evaluat[ing] simulation algorithms for present and future HPC architectures, perform[ing] original research within their field, and organiz[ing] (‘hands-on’) workshops for code development and optimization.
Frankfurt’s Lab connects this NHR@SW mandate to the day-to-day work of researchers at Goethe University, with strong ties to the local GPU and quantum-computing infrastructure.
What we are not
We are not a help desk. We are not a single-product team. We are not a substitute for a research group’s own technical staff — though we are happy to make those staff better.
How we work
We work primarily with researchers across Goethe University Frankfurt. External collaborators are welcome where it makes sense — typically when they share a project, a cluster account, or a piece of software we maintain.
Most contact is through email or the ticket system. For longer engagements we schedule consultations or work alongside a research group as embedded support. See the contact page for the channels we offer.