Computers and networks play an essential role particularly in the field of scientific research and engineering – the key activities of PMOD/WRC. Before the advent of modern computers, a real person was often employed as a “computer” whose work was then gradually taken over by mechanical calculation machines and in the 1970s by a PDP-11 computer. Since then, our facilites have evolved into a complex system of servers, networking hardware and end-user operated devices. Most of our services are operated on-site on our hardware. For compute-intensive research activities, we make use of both external high performance server centers as well as our own servers.
Our first connection to the Internet occurred in the late 1980s, and shortly thereafter our domain “pmodwrc.ch” was registered as one of the oldest second-level domains in Switzerland. Since then we have exchanged countless amounts of data with research partners in Switzerland as well as with international institutions and the commercial Internet. Currently, several terabytes of data are transferred every month to and from the Swiss National Research and Education Network (NREN). The latter is operated by SWITCH, who ensures a reliable and highly capable connection to research partners both in Switzerland and abroad. SWITCH also provides excellent support regarding network and computer security as well as Internet services.
Our institute is covered by eduroam WiFi for employees and visitors from other research and education institutions. Having originated in Europe, eduroam allows users from an eduroam participating site to obtain network access at any institute connected to eduroam.
As a service open to the general public, our observatory provides two NTP time servers that are synchronised to a common high-precision GPS/GLONASS/GALILEO receiver. You can query our time servers using the host names ntp1.pmodwrc.ch and ntp2.pmodwrc.ch. If you are located near us, ie. within Switzerland or one of the neighboring countries, you will get a typical accuracy better than one millisecond. Our NTP servers participate in the worldwide NTP Pool Project.