Staff
In total MPA had 120 staff members (including external financing) of whom 46 are scientists; in addition 34 PhD students and 61 (alle Wiss. mehr als 14 Tage am Institut) guest scientists.

Building
The MPA building itself is a major asset for its research activities. It was specially designed by the same architect as ESO headquarters, and the two buildings are generally considered as important and highly original examples of the architecture of their period. Although the unconventional geometry of the MPA can easily confuse first-time visitors, its open and centrally focussed plan is very effective at encouraging interaction between scientists and makes for a pleasant and stimulating research environment.

Library
The MPA and the MPE share a large and fully stocked astronomical library, which is housed in the MPA building. All major astronomical books and periodicals are available. The library staff can also provide access to a variety of on-line archives and are currently extending this capability. Further library material is available at ESO, which in addition maintains a complete collection of optical sky maps and photographic sky surveys.

Data Facilities
Other large data analysis facilities are available at the MPE, which is the European data centre for the ROSAT satellite, and is providing a data centre for the ISO satellite mission.

Computing Facilities
The MPA has always placed considerable emphasis on computational astrophysics and has therefore ensured access to forefront computing facilities. The current in-house system is based on several central LINUX-based compute servers, with additional SUN workstations for specific applications. Users have free access to all workstations and are connected via Linux desktop-PCs. Data are kept on central fileservers with a capacity of close to 20 Terabyte, and distributed with the advanced filesystem AFS. For larger computing tasks MPA scientists use the facilities of the central computing centre of the Max-Planck Society (known as theRZG). This is part of the MPI für Plasmaphysik and is located a few hundred metres from the MPA. Current facilities at the RZG include a massive parallel IBM-Regatta cluster, a 64-processor SGI Altix, an Opteron cluster, a Blade center, and a mass storage system of several 100 TByte. MPA scientists have free access to the RZG and are among the top users of the facilities there. The AFS file system ensures that the transfer of data not only between the MPA machines, but also from MPA to the RZG is almost transparent. MPA and RZG are connected via GByte-ethernet and protected by a powerful firewall. The connection to the outside world is via the fast DFN-Gbyte backbone.