Services provided by the Computing and Data Centre

The services rendered by the Centre serve two main missions:

• To provide and support a productive and reliable working environment for AWI personell, guests and visitors.
• To provide and support specialized systems for innovative IT-based  work,  AWI's truely global infrastructure and the informations systems to preserve and access publications, datasets and other information.

AWI Working Environment

Since research at AWI is done in quite a large number of disciplines, observing as well as modelling, in the laboratory as well as on ships and airborne, there is no such thing as the standard IT equipment and environment for a scientist or engineer at AWI: Thin clients, desk- or laptop systems or workstations act as frontends to supercomputers and server farms or as selfcontained, portable tool "in the field".  There is no standard operating system either: There is a strong population of Windows-systems, but also a large number of MacOS, Solaris and Linux systems.

Standard services for all users and platforms are (secure) connectivity and remote access (ssh, VPN), mail, SMB- and NFS-Fileservices, printing and backup.

Some important applications which are available only on the Windows platform (MS-Office) or which pose special demands on their environment (GIS) or have a costly  license structure (GIS, MATLAB) are available through a Citrix server farm, thus making them available to all (at least to those who are online).

Binding together of all platforms is achieved through an Identity Management System, which provides for each person just one name and password for (almost) all services and platforms.

Since the AWI members work at four sites in Germany, two of them  being on islands, (and more "offshore") technical means to optimize personal and group  communication are an important service. Beginning with unified white pages, mailing lists congruent with working groups, and ending with meeting and lecture rooms equiped with high quality videoconferencing systems.

Specialized, Innovative and Community-wide Services

Databases
Archiving
GIS

HLRN
Parallel Computing
DKRZ