The IT services department is responsible for planning, operation and advancement of the institute's information technology infrastructure. Based on this infrastructure, a broad range of digital services for both science and administration is provided by the team. Furthermore, the team's IT specialists advise staff and guests on the use of  the offered services and help to solve technical problems.

At the heart of the IT infrastructure and crucial to PIK's success, a supercomputer - closely combined with hierarchical mass storage - is providing resources that are essential for scientific computing and data management. Supported by this unique and invaluable scientific instrument, an international team of researchers is developing highly complex mathematical models of natural and social systems that are used for computationally intensive numerical experiments that in turn provide deep insights into the systems under consideration, their potential interactions and most likely evolution.

A variety of additional services complement the supercomputer core of our infrastructure - ranging from data networks, to central file services, data backup and -archive facilities, a server virtualization infrastructure, software engineering platforms all the way to about five hundred centrally managed mobile edge devices used by employees and scientific guests of the institute for their daily work. And since modern science would be unthinkable without global cooperation, advanced digital collaboration platforms, for example private clouds, chat platforms, web portals, video- and web conferencing services as well as the underlying authentication & authorization infrastructure, are another important cornerstone of the work of the IT team.

Photo cortesy of Lothar Lindenhan