Wolfgang E. Nagel holds the Chair of Computer Architecture at the Institute of Computer Engineering and is the Director of the Center for Information Services and High-Performance Computing (ZIH). As an Academic Unit at TU Dresden, the ZIH is responsible for the university’s communication infrastructure and operates the central IT servers and services.  Since science today is reliant on extensive research data, Prof. Nagel and his team ensure that powerful information infrastructures are available for this purpose and function with a high degree of reliability, security and stability. This requires in-house research and development work, which is highly interdisciplinary.

In addition, Prof. Nagel is the scientific coordinator of the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig). Being one of five Competence Centers for Artificial Intelligence (AI), ScaDS.AI with its locations in Dresden and Leipzig combines the excellent AI and Data Science expertise of Technische Universität Dresden, the Leipzig University as well as ten non-university research institutions. This makes it one of Germany's largest centers for data-intensive science and artificial intelligence.

Both centers are located at TU Dresden under the umbrella of the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Sciences (CIDS). TU Dresden - under the leadership of Prof. Nagel as founding director - concentrates the scientific and technological know-how for cross-disciplinary research on a plethora of topics of digitalization in this center, from high-performance computing, modeling and simulation to data analysis, artificial intelligence, knowledge extraction and transfer, and numerous other digitalization topics.

Four questions for Prof. Wolfgang E. Nagel

What does excellence mean to you?

The Excellence Strategy promotes clusters that ensure excellence and are reviewed by international experts. These clusters obviously need infrastructure, and we at ZIH are responsible for ensuring that this infrastructure is provided at the necessary level. In other words, excellent prerequisites and fundamentals are needed in method development. And that's what we're working on.

What are you working on?

The world is now largely determined by digitalization advances, and my team and I are ensuring that we use a broad range of infrastructure, but also many innovative methods, to promote this digital world in our university.

How has your work evolved over time?

When I came to the TU Dresden 25 years ago, my goal was to further develop IT and to provide qualified support. We have been running high-performance computers from the beginning. Over the past 20 years, this has increasingly been extended to data infrastructures and now also to artificial intelligence. It is not just a matter of providing hardware, but also of providing methodological support - in other words, ensuring that scientific research can be carried out professionally with the full support of digitalization.

How does the ScaDS.AI support research?

We have created exactly the scientific environment that will be needed in the next few years with ScaDS.AI, a new center for artificial intelligence and data analysis - covering all Clusters of Excellence. It is a major concern as to how we support digitalization in research and at the same time also the applications of our excellent researchers with regard to the next round of the Excellence Strategy.