Helmholtz Federated IT Services (HIFIS)

Our modern IT Infrastructure Platform forms the technical basis for the Helmholtz Association's cutting-edge research. At the same time, it simplifies collaboration and exchange between our research centers.

Credit: Conny Schneider/unsplash

In order to pool our expertise even more comprehensively, we collaborate across the boundaries of our six research fields. HIFIS (Helmholtz Federated IT Services) supports this exchange at the IT level: The platform creates a seamless and powerful digital infrastructure for all members of the Helmholtz Association and their collaboration partners.

HIFIS offers cloud-based IT resources and services, as well as consulting, and a network of experts to scientific projects. Our offerings are entangled: As a fundamental service, the Helmholtz AAI is particularly important: It allows controlled access to the Helmholtz Cloud and connects scientists, not only within the community, but also with experts from other institutions, such as universities and research institutes. All parties can log in with their home institution’s credentials to access the services in the Helmholtz Cloud, while maintaining the access rights of the teams. More than 20 services from the areas of collaboration, infrastructure, supercomputing, data storage and science are available and supported by a helpdesk.

These include:

a collaborative software development platform with extensive Continuous Integration capabilities (Helmholtz Codebase with GitLab).
a service for organizing and managing events (HIFIS Events with Indico)
a web-based chat service (with Mattermost)
interactive computing via Jupyter notebooks
a collaboration service for documents including office app (with Nextcloud)
collaborative writing of markdown documents (Notes with HedgeDoc)
Helmholtz Data Projects (HDF with JARDS)
interactive supercomputing on HPC resources (HAICORE with Jupyter)

In addition, we support researchers who want to develop and publish high-quality scientific software (Research Software Engineering, RSE). For this purpose, HIFIS offers, among other things, free consulting. We provide advice on software engineering, open source and licensing issues, and on implementation of new or existing software projects. We provide software developers and projects with the Helmholtz Software Spotlights and the Research Software Directory. We also demonstrate the successful application of HIFIS services in scientific projects in our Use Cases.

Another pillar is Education & Training: We offer both introductory and advanced courses in the field of software engineering, focusing on the needs of scientists. In addition to the regular courses, special courses can also be requested.

Further information: See HIFIS website