The Carl Zeiss Foundation provides funding for over four years for the Competence Center for HPC in the Natural Sciences at the Institute of Computer Science of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). The competence center for high performance computing (HPC) promotes interdisciplinary collaborations between the natural sciences and computer science at Mainz University over the long term. The new competence center targets specific problems in computer and natural sciences in the areas of simulation and the evaluation of Big Data.