The main area of information research serves, on the one hand, the preparation of new information technologies for the more distant future. Work also concentrates on the use of supercomputers in the field of scientific computing in research and development.

The project on materials, processes and devices for micro- and nanoelectronics comprises information processing in logic devices, information storage in random access memories (RAM) and mass memories, and information transmission on the chip and system level as well as over great distances. Added to this is the specific area of sensor technology as an interface to the real outside world. The research topics result from the challenges to be derived from the advancement of microelectronics and the entry into nanoelectronics and from the potential for novel functions such as the inorganic-biological interface for information exchange between microelectronics and nerve cells.

This research area is located at the interface between pure basic research and application-oriented development. It is characterized by pronounced interdisciplinarity linking solid-state physics, inorganic chemistry, process technology, informatics, various fields of analysis as well as theory. This range will in future be extended by biochemistry and molecular biology.

In the past few decades mathematics, informatics, science and technology have developed into the strategic discipline of scientific computing. Its focus is on complex systems, i.e. on problems that cannot be solved by analytical methods or with conventional computer resources. Its technique is simulation, its instrument is the supercomputer, its aid is visualization. Exploring and developing new concepts, methods and techniques of supercomputing is the aim of the R&D project on the operation and further development of supercomputers, with which Research Centre Jülich and the John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) have excellently positioned themselves within the group of German and international supercomputer centres.