Despite tight finances: UBT invests in IT

Around one million euros will be invested in a new central data backup to be better positioned in case of possible attacks. "The University of Bayreuth wants to provide all researchers, teachers and students, as well as the science-supporting staff, with an up-to-date, reliable and highly available central data backup," says Dr Andreas Grandel, Head of the IT Service Centre (ITS) at the University of Bayreuth.

The previous central data backup was no longer up to date and no longer sufficiently met the ever-advancing requirements of fast data backup as well as fast data recovery. In order to provide high-performance and fail-safe services even in the event of ransomware attacks, the central data backup therefore had to be further developed from the perspective of information security.

The IT Service Centre is the central IT service provider of the University of Bayreuth. Its services range from consulting and training offers for all university members to network operation, software and hardware supply as well as numerous basic services and also to offers for the digitalisation of teaching or research data. "An important role for the reliable provision of all these services is played by a high-performance and information-secure central data backup," emphasises Chancellor Dr Nicole Kaiser. "That's why it was particularly important for us as university management, also against the background of experiences at other universities, to make the necessary funds available for the ITS despite a tight financial situation."

Furthermore, as a major investment in the IT area, a new high-performance computer is being procured for approximately 2.8 million euros with great commitment from the chairs. With the new computing cluster, the Keylab HPC (High Performance Computing), which is operated by ITS for the Research Centre for Scientific Computing at the University of Bayreuth (BZHPC) founded in 2018, will be expanded once again. The university is thus well positioned for the coming years in research.

Specifically, the new Linux cluster will enable computationally intensive research projects in a wide range of subject and research areas. These range, among other things, from the investigation of the electronic structure of complex materials to questions in the context of artificial intelligence (AI). The topics include AI-based product and process optimisation, but also AI-supported investigation of the dynamics of fluids and soft matter as well as the simulation and analysis of ecosystems and the AI-based analysis of medical data.