Astrophysical Institute Potsdam
With a history going back 300 years, the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) is one of Germany's oldest institutes in astronomy and today's most important institute in astrophysics in the "Neue Bundesländer".The AIP's two main research directions are:
- Cosmic magnetic fields, solar and stellar activity
- Extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology
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Supercomputing:
Numerical simulations, reduction and analysis of huge observational datasets -
Optical instrumentation for large telescopes: the AIP is a partner of
- Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), building the LBT Spectrograph (PEPSI)
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GREGOR, the
most powerful solar telescope in the world
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a 3D Spectrograph, the "Multi Unit Spectral Explorer" (MUSE) for ESO's VLT facility
and the Euro3D RTN
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Surveys:
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Robotic Telescopes:
- STELLA on Tenerife
- Wolfgang and Amadeus in Arizona
- RoboTel in Potsdam
- Sanssouci (270 AMD Opteron CPUs)
- Octopus (72 Pentium4 CPUs)
- Omega (an 8 node Alpha cluster, each node featuring a GRAPE-5 board, calculating gravitational interactions in N-Body problems with a sustained performance of 400 Gflops per board)
Computation intensive astrophysical applications in magnetohydrodynamics, stellar and gas dynamics:
- Open Source or publicly available codes: Gadget, ZEUS, ART
- Codes originating in AIP: GRAPESPH, NIRVANA, AMIGA (MLAPM)
- e-astronomy: e-science at AIP
- Helmholtz Institute of Supercomputing: a supercomputing summer school
- Numerical modelling for massive parallel computer architectures
- A leading role in the development of software for robotic telecopes
- Co-Initiator of the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO)
- Regional center of Grid development: collaboration between AEI, ZIB, UP and AIP
AIP is a member of the WGL: Leibniz Gemeinschaft.