Leibniz Rechenzentrum

The Leibniz Computing Centre (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, LRZ) provides the following services to the scientific and academic communities in Munich:

• general IT services for the universities in Munich and for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW),
• a powerful communications infrastructure called the Munich Scientific Network (Münchner Wissenschaftsnetz, MWN), and a competence centre for data communication networks,
• archiving and backup of large amounts of data on extensive disk and automated magnetic tape storage,
• a technical and scientific high performance Supercomputing Centre for all German universities.

The origins of the LRZ go back to the year 1962, when Hans Piloty and Robert Sauer founded the "Electronic Computing Committee" in the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, today's "Informatics Committee". It was under their auspices that the LRZ was created as the joint computing centre for research and education for all Munich universities, funded by the Free State of Bavaria. Its name is a tribute to the great philosopher and universal scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who first presented his concept of the binary system in a scholarly piece to the Académie des Sciences in Paris. He also provided the basis for differential calculus and invented one of the first working four-operation calculating machines providing arithmetic operations.