Service Infrastructure

One of the responsibilities of the Central Lab Facilities is the development and advancement of infrastructure related solutions. The designated objective is to model efficient and effective solutions for the - at times - special needs in the context of the Excellence Cluster Cognitive Interaction Technology.
In the field of software development, amongst others, continuous integration of software components is also an issue, that is tackled within the Central Lab Facilities. Many software components are required to run and interact seamlessly on different soft- and hardware environments. It is hence a great assistance to the developer to have a service at hand that automatically checks for function and interoperability of his component.
In this line, in the area of cooperative research environments and the management of research related data, the Central Lab Facilities are using state of the art software and methodologies, with the clear entitlement to push the development into directions of recent challenges in research. The portfoil of provided services is completed by Bibliography Data Management, Directory Service, Social Networks and Instant Messaging Infrastructure.

Research Data Management

The Central Lab Facilities work together with the CITEC work groups that are organised in different faculties, and service providers of Bielefeld University to establish common research data management strategies and solutions for all disciplines participating in CITEC. The Central Lab Facilities participate in the Focus Group Research Data, a University Focus Group that develops the research data management plans of Bielefeld University in cooperation with experts from main research and central service facilities of Bielefeld University.

• Bibliography Data Management
  In tight cooperation with the University Library of Bielefeld University the Central Lab Facilities developed a migration and usage strategy to manage all bibliography data of CITEC on the new central PUB publication service of Bielefeld University. This helped to make CITEC one of the pioneer adaptors of the new service; the CLF provided use cases and support in software development for integration of bibliography data in content management systems. The use of the PUB service allows the researchers of CITEC to participate in Open Access by releasing their research papers where possible.
• Open Research
  With support from the legal services and the data protection commissioner of Bielefeld University the Central Lab Facilities developed an Open Research service for CITEC. It comprises a Open Research Web service for hosting Open Data and Open Source projects, and a procedure for releasing data and source code under Open licenses. The participation in the Open Knowledge in Science movement helps others to benefit of the research output created at CITEC.

Research WLAN

Together with the the Rechnerbetriebsgruppe of the Faculty of Technology, the Hochschulrechenzentrum and safety administrator of Bielefeld University we developed an WiFi infrastructure for use in research context. It is designed to suffice research project requirements by providing the availability, confidentiality and integrity required during experiment and demonstration while not interfering with the University-wide WiFi network.

Cooperative Research Environment

The Central Lab Facilities provide a sophisticated infrastructure for cooperation and collaboration among all members of CITEC. Core internal services of the infrastructure are the CITEC member directory, a collaborative project development environment, a social network, and instant messaging.

• CITEC Member Directory
  The CITEC Member Directory stores the list of employees and is used as authorisation facility for all CITEC services. It is realised with an LDAP directory server. A custom LDAP class definition allows storing the various institutional information of the members while maintaining a maximum compatibility to established standards such as netOrgPerson LDAP Object Class.
• Collaborative Project Development Environment
  The CITEC Collaborative Project Development Environment provides research projects with facilities to organise and perform team work. The projects are organised by research topic and hence support the complex organisational matrix structures found in research projects at CITEC. The projects are visible to all CITEC members supporting interdisciplinary awareness and collaboration. Every project provides a news system, issue tracking, project planning (e.g., project milestones and Gantt charts), document storage, and a dedicated revision control system. The Central Lab Facilities provide support for practical project planning and implementation with the Collaborative Project Development Environment. There are currently more than 100 different project ventures hosted on the platform.
• CITEC Social Network
  The CITEC Social Network is a dedicated social network for researchers at CITEC. It allows finding people with similar or complemental interests regarding research or spare time activity, and to organise and share knowledge not bound to concrete project work. Every CITEC member may create interest groups and content in discussion forums, on Wiki pages and Blogs, in document and picture collections, and as calendar entries. Currently there are nearly 30 different research and leisure activities groups.
• Instant Messaging Service
  The Instant Messaging Service allows CITEC members to use real-time text-based communication and provides them with awareness information about each other. It supports online meetings with multi-user chats and document transfer across the organisational boundaries within CITEC.

Compute Cluster

The Central Lab Facilities administer a small High Performance Compute Cluster consisting of 16 Compute nodes with 8 CPU-Cores each. The Compute Cluster runs Gentoo Linux which has been tuned to maximally fit the hardware and make the most out of the 128 Cores and 256 GB Ram. The Compute Cluster accepts massive parallel jobs as well as single threaded processes. For the best performance, a separate NFS-Server is used.