IT and Software Development Group
The IT and Software Development Service Group is responsible for running the standard central infrastructure, such as file servers, compute clusters and core switches, as well as providing support, backup, long-term archiving, security and the kind of services found at many research institutes: identity management, mail, WLAN, eduroam, cloud-type services, databases, source code repositories and several web-based services. Where feasible, we use virtual environments with a high-availability configuration.
Our support service has a strong background in software development with a special emphasis on scientific visualization, image analysis and database-related development. Our software development activities have lead to international users of our software (VINCI) and some long-standing industrial partnerships. We enjoy the benefits of multi-platform development (Linux, MacOS, Windows). We are also interested in “workflow documentation” for reproducible research (VHIST) as part of our effort to support “Good Scientific Practise”.
We initiated a close collaboration with the MPI for Biology of Ageing, which resulted in joint BAR grant applications for shared resources, i.e. a partitioned enterprise-grade tape library, as well as the same components for compute servers and large-scale storage (a parallel file system). This strategy was very successful in terms of funding and we also benefit from shared technical challenges and colocation.