New Lead of Systems Department

Ulf Garternicht played a significant role in the planning, procurement, installation, and operation of four generations of HLRE (High Performance Computing System for Earth System Research) since 2002. Thanks to his commitment and perseverance, world-class high-performance computers with exceptionally large hard disk systems have been installed at DKRZ.

When he took over as head of the Systems Department in 2008, he was the driving force behind setting up the computer center at the new location in Bundesstraße 45a, ensuring its smooth operation. He paid particular attention to energy efficiency, so that today the data center is among the best in its class with a PUE (Power Utilization Efficiency) of 1.1 and a system for waste heat recovery. During this time, the magnetic tape archive was upgraded to an exascale data archive, the object storage system was introduced; further an on-prem cloud infrastructure was established at the site.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to Ulf Garternicht for his successful and enduring commitment and wish his successor Dr. Carsten Schmitt every success in his continuation.

After his study of computer science at the University of Cologne, Carsten Schmitt had been working for several years as a system administrator in the private sector in Rhineland. In 2008, he moved to the IT service group "CIS" as part of the Cluster of Excellence CliSAP at the University of Hamburg, where he was responsible for the IT infrastructure, monitoring, HPC and storage. There was already close cooperation with the DKRZ during this time. With the establishment of the "CEN-IT" service team for geosciences, he also worked intensively on automation and backup systems.

Since May 2018, Carsten Schmitt has been working at the DKRZ as a system administrator in the storage area and was announced as its group head in 2021. He was responsible for the tape archive with hierarchical storage management, the backup infrastructure and the object storage.

From September 15, 2023, he will now head the department Systems and is looking forward to the exciting new challenges and design opportunities in this position.