Computer Center

The computer center manages the entire IT-infrastructure necessary for running a research institute that focuses on experiments and theoretical simulations.

The main components of this infrastructure are the central servers of the institute, such as the servers for the scientific computations, for mail, print, back-up and the webserver, the printers, plotters and workstations.

For developing, testing and executing of computer programs that need limited CPU time, an HPC-cluster is available that has an x86_64 architecture with 784 kernels and 4TB main memory. More complex programs are run at the Gesellschaft für wissenschftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDG; society for scientific data processing Göttingen), or at the computer center in Garching, München.

The network-attached storage (NAS) with its approximately 350 TB storage capacity is mainly used for experimental data that were acquired within various space projects with participation of the MPS.

The data are back-up and archived with a Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) system.

About 500 PC-based workstations and monitoring stations are connected with the network. Two thirds of these are operated under Window, one third under Linux. They are mainly managed and maintained by the computer center.

The personal service of the computer center includes in addition to general IT advice of the approximately 300 users also special support for parellelizing and optimizing of CPU-intensive programs, for developing data bases and web applications, graphical programing and processing of satellite data.

The institute meets the tasks data archiving within its various international projects and collaborations. The computer center manages the required technical infrastructure for this task.