title: HIFIS Mission
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excerpt:
    Overview of HIFIS Motivation, Structure and Governance.

Motivation for HIFIS

The top position of Helmholtz research is increasingly based on cross-centre and international cooperation and common access to data treasure and -services. At the same time the significance of a sustainable software development for the research process is recognised.

HIFIS aims to ensure an excellent information environment for outstanding research in all Helmholtz research fields and a seamless and performant IT-infrastructure connecting knowledge from all centres. It will build a secure and easy-to-use collaborative environment with efficiently accessible ICT services from anywhere. HIFIS will also support the development of research software with a high level of quality, visibility and sustainability.

See here for more details on platform proposal.

Participating centers

The following 11 out of 19 Helmholtz centres are partnering for HIFIS: AWI, DESY, DLR, DKFZ, FZJ, GFZ, HMGU, HZB, HZDR, KIT, UFZ.

Technical Documentation

For HIFIS technical documentation, see here.

Partners

HIFIS is embedded in the context of the Helmholtz Information & Data Science Incubator and hence has close collaboration with the four other incubator platforms:

• Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy (HIDA)
• Helmholtz Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Unit (Helmholtz AI)
• Helmholtz Imaging Platform (HIP)
• Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration

Internal structure

To achieve its goals, HIFIS works in three Competence Clusters which are distributed throughout different Helmholtz research centers:

• Cloud Services: Federated platform for proven first class cloud services;
• Backbone Services: High-performance trusted network infrastructure with unified basic services;
• Software Services: Platform, training and support for high-quality, sustainable software development.

External supervision

To ensure that HIFIS's progress and strategy is consistent with the common principles of the Helmholtz Association, Reporting, Governance and an external Scientific Advisory Board are central.