The Deutsche Elektronensynchrotron DESY is the German national high energy physics laboratory, located at Hamburg and in the vicinity of Berlin. It is currently operating four accelerator facilities, including the Proton-Electron-Storage Ring HERA and the synchrotron radiation source DORIS for a large international research community in the fields of high energy physics, chemistry, material science, medicine and biology. It has ~1300 staff employees and ~800 visiting scientists on site.

DESY Central Computing has to provide services for a thorougly heterogenuous user community, which can be roughly categorised into three not well defined groups:

o (M) Accelerator Design, Operations, Control, Machine Physics
(Monitoring, Control, Readout, CAD, Database Services)
o (F) Research scientists
(Physics Software Development, Batch and Online Analysis)
o (V) Administrative Staff
(Office Products, special administrative Software)

Central services offer large-scale mainframe-services centered around large classical Unix-clusters. The access to these services is facilitated by ~1000 X-terminals and an increasing number of PCs running X-Emulations.

As of now, there are about ~2500 PCs on site, ~800 of which are Pentium or better, a sizable majority of which are used by the M-groups. Until recently, most of the PCs were running Windows3.1 and Novell Netware4.1 with a few tens of different root servers operated mostly locally by the various groups themselves. The need for a stable operating systems and current commercial software has prompted many groups to investigate into using WindowsNT as the basis of their work.

On a different approach, commodity hardware is seen as the solution for future computing needs for future experiments and accelerators. The physics community is investigation the possiblity of assembling large PC-Farms, either the classical single purpose numbercrunching farms (high bandwidth, high throughput, low versatility, low accessablity), or a batch system (high accessablity, high versatility, medium bandwith), or a analysis farm (low bandwidth, high accessablity, high versatility). The research community is also moving to PC-hardware for the standard desktop.

To meet the demand for WindowsNT, to coordinate the growth and deployment of operating systems and software, to design and mediate the DESY WindowsNT infrastructure and to design, create and operate central services, the DESY WindowsNT Project Group was created as an interdepartmental taskforce, comprising of members of central computing and of the electronics research groups. The DESY WindowsNT infrastructure holds ~500 users with ~290 active installations over both routed LAN and WAN between Hamburg and Berlin, with a strong growth tendency.

The main areas of interest and research of the DESY WindowsNT project group are:
o Large Scale System Administration
o Remote Installation and Unattended Configuration
o Large Scale Application Service Provision
o WindowsNT Workstation as a High Energy Physics Analysis Tool
o WindowsNT as Number Crunching Operating System.