It is foreseeable that fundamental questions of life sciences, elementary particle physics and the applied sciences can only be answered by unifying world-wide computer capacities. An interdisciplinary group of researchers at the Albert Ludwig University has therfore joined forces in order to establish such an infrastructure in Freiburg looking for new solutions in scientific computation. Participants are among others: the newly founded Bernstein Zentrum for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN), the Physikalisches Institut of the University of Freiburg, the Freiburger Material Forschungszentrum (FMF), the Rechenzentrum of the university, Department of Computer Science, and the Institut für Mikrosystemtechnik (IMTEK).

The initiative with the name Black Forest Grid started the construction of a GRID computer system, which will in combination with globally distributed computing resources provide the opportunity for doing numerical research of hitherto infeasible dimensions.