The Information Systems service (INAF-SI) is active since August 2005.

Its activity is based on the work carried out by the “Computing, Networks and Archives” Committee , nominated on June 2004

The tasks of INAF-SI are:

• To coordinate at a national level the services concerning the computer network, the computing resources and the scientific archives of INAF;
• To manage the activities related to computing and to the use of the network;
• To oversee the management, the planning and the international integration of Databases and Distributed Computing;
• To coordinate the research work in the fields of computing, networks and archives of scientific data, if aimed at providing in the future a service for the users;
• To identify and to make operational the initiatives required for the coordination of all the computer science activities within the Institute, harmonizing the management and development policies;
• To improve the support for the users (both scientific and non-scientific), through the realization of synergies and scale economies , in the meantime guaranteeing a single connection point for all the institutions, which are outside INAF and operate in this field;
• To provide the computer support for the administrative and managerial duties pertaining to the headquarters;
• To provide the computer support as regards the management of  the bookkeeping system and the future unified system to manage the legal status and the financial treatment of staff;

The service is currently organised as a full-fledged structure within the Projects Department and consequently as a second level responsibility centre.

Amongst lots of activities carried out by INAF-SI up to now, it’s worth mentioning: 

• the monitoring of network traffic at all INAF sites and bandwidth increase where it was considered necessary;
• network connection experiments by radio link;
• the renewal of the agreement with CINECA;
• a census of the existing parallel computing systems;
• initiatives directed to the creation of a computational Grid for INAF and the coordination with Grid activities at the national (IGI) and European (EGEE) levels;
• initiatives directed to the creation of a Virtual Italian Observatory  (VObs.it) and the coordination with the international enterprises in this field (Euro-VO,IVOA);
• the participation in the European collaboration for the definition of a new generation data processing environment (FASE);
• a census of the scientific and commercial software in use; the purchase of  “campus” licenses for INAF for some products (Microsoft, IDL, Oracle, ...) and the related distribution of software;
• the carrying out of different studies and analysis.