CIS - shorthand for Central IT Services

CIS provides IT support for all Institutes organized in ZMAW (Center for Marine and Atmospheric sciences) and most members of CLISAP. Support ranges from hardware procurement and repair, software, mail and websites to server administration for high end computing. For detailed information about our responsibilities, please have a look at the list below.

Nucleus of CIS is the so called help-desk. All requests, preferred via email, are collected here. Students answer all first and second level rated requests and distribute the more challenging ones to our staff of fulltime administrators. 

CIS has considerably expanded since 1999, in correspondence to the growing number of supported institutes and extended responsibilities. The quality of our support is based on a staff of specialised experts and long and well documented experience. CIS provides the technical basis necessary for excellent research and is able to offer individual assistance for all scientists.

CIS was founded in 1999. The predecessor DKRZ partly served as IT-support for the Institutes who joined forces under the new umbrella organisation ZMAW. At that time every scientist maintained their workstation themselves, to a certain degree. The rapid development of Information Technology demanded a reliable and highly capable IT-support.

The obvious solution was a Central IT Service. Centralised know-how and experience, means effective and consistent support, means to keep the budget for IT as low as feasible.

On the other hand IT-Environment at ZMAW was (and still is) highly homogenous. A wide range of applications, server and hardware is needed to provide the best research environment for everyone. To allow the necessary flexibility and to link the central service to a multitude of groups and departments the masteruser concept has been created. Masteruser are responsible for the IT-environment of their group. They define requirements in close communication with CIS.

Over the years CIS grew and now provides all IT related support but High Performance Computing for Earth System Models which is now the main responsibility of the DKRZ.

 

CIS provides the following services: