This European Partnership project involves both, ambitious scientific projects as well as contributions to the use and development of scientific infrastructures. The scientific projects in the fields of materials research, environmental chemistry, microbial technologies, and high-performance computing are not only selected with respect to state-of-the-art research. They also concern general aspects of fundamental importance for present research strategies and societal challenges. These aspects are (i) to integrate current developments from diverse research fields (e.g. life science and materials science) and to foster interdisciplinary research, (ii) to identify the scale-depending relationship between processes on the atomic level and their consequences on the material’s macroscopic properties, and, (iii) to use high-performance computing systems for the simulation of complex processes in order to provide quantitative predictability. Therefore, within these interdisciplinary oriented projects, we are crossing barriers between different research disciplines and length scales from the atomic level to the macroscopic world.