IT and Software Development Group

The IT and Software Development Service Group is responsible for running and maintaining central file services, infrastructure for networking and high-performance computing, as well as providing support, backup, long-term archiving, security and the kind of services considered “best practice” in the MPG IT community, namely identity management, mail, WLAN, cloud-type services, databases, source code repositories and several web-based services.

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), some long-standing industrial partnerships as well as substantial licence proceeds. 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 provide infastructure for High-Perfomance Computing (HPC), mostly used via SLURM (scheduler) and ThinLinc (RDP for Linux), also a PB-class central file system (migrated to CephFS in 2024, it was BeeGFS before, and Sun SAM-FS before that). The central file system and our Proxmox virtualisation cluster are highly available, in a configuration spanning three server halls. Almost all services (excluding HPC applications) run on virtualised infrastructure.

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. This strategy was very successful in terms of funding and we also benefit from shared technical challenges and colocation.