Management of Large-Scale e-Infrastructures at LRZ

Scientific computing relies heavily on e-Infrastructures as one of the cornerstones of today’s advancements in research. These e-Infrastructures include advanced IT architectures such as supercomputers, grids, clouds, and the networks interconnecting them. In order to deliver high-quality services provided by these systems to the users, adequate IT management is an essential requirement. The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) is one of the world’s largest e-Infrastructure providers and strongly devoted to contributing to and utilizing the field of IT Service Management (ITSM). After initiating its ITSM program in 2006, today many of the services provided by the LRZ are ITSM-driven. Processes have been adopted in alignment with ITIL best practices. Learning from “commercial” ITSM, and applying it to academic e-Infrastructures such as grids and clouds has been recognized as an effort that is vital for the sustained success of these developments. This challenge is subject of the EC-funded gSLM project, which is led by LRZ and will be demonstrated in this talk. A major goal of LRZ is complete certification against ISO/IEC 200001 in the near future. This follows the belief that IT Service Management is a basic ingredient for delivering the best services to its customers.