ZIH-Info No. 190, July 2025

Service Desk: New opening hours

Due to operational reasons, the opening hours of the Service Desk will change as of July 1, 2025. In-person consultations on site will then be available Monday to Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The team will still be reachable by phone and email as usual from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. (Contact: )

ZIH storage infrastructure successfully renewed

In May, ZIH’s storage-related network infrastructure (Storage Area Networks) was modernized. These system supports services such as backups, group drives, archiving, and long-term storage for SLUB. At both ZIH data center locations – the Lehmann Center (LZR) and Trefftz Building (TRE) – outdated components were replaced with systems running Fabric OS Generation 9. Hard disk and tape storage networks, previously separate, were logically consolidated. This noticeably reduced architectural complexity and eased operational and administrative overhead. (Contact: )

Central load balancer modernized

ZIH's central load balancer service has been fundamentally overhauled. Dedicated hardware appliances were replaced by a virtualized solution that offers greater flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Thanks to a new architecture using dynamic routing via the BGP protocol, services can now be distributed across multiple data centers simultaneously. (Contact: )

Migration to eduVPN

The transition of all remote access VPN services at TU Dresden to eduVPN continues. After the deactivation of the previous OpenVPN service in May, all remaining VPN connections will be enabled for use with eduVPN in July. The existing access options via Cisco Secure Client (formerly AnyConnect) and OpenConnect will be gradually phased out. Some of the affected VPN connections are scheduled for deactivation in October, with the remainder to follow in December 2025. If eduVPN does not work in individual cases, the issue should be reported to the Service Desk. In such cases, the deactivation of the previous VPN connection can be postponed until December. Further information and support: https://faq.tickets.tu-dresden.de/v/ItemID=1270. (Contact: )

New in the Self-service Portal

TU Dresden’s Self-service Portal now also supports electronic voting. Both registration (if needed) and voting are handled directly through the portal. Registration is done via the central Single Sign-On system (Shibboleth), ensuring that only pseudonymized voter lists are passed on to the voting system.
As of July 2, users can voluntarily upload a profile picture for internal services – initially for use in the new intranet. In the future, additional internal and, if desired, external services will also be able to access this image. (Contact: )

Exchange/Email: Sender validation activated

On June 23, 2025, sender validation was enabled in the Exchange configuration for emails sent via the SMTP protocol. This mainly affects users who send emails through applications other than Outlook, such as Thunderbird or apps with custom SMTP settings. From now on, only sender addresses linked to the respective ZIH login can be used. This measure helps to better protect TU Dresden’s email system against spam and phishing emails sent from compromised accounts. (Contact: )

Competitive success for scalable storage

A joint team from ZIH and ThinkParQ GmbH (BeeGFS) from Kaiserslautern has won the first Team Challenge of the newly launched Scalable Storage Competition (SSC), organized by the GWDG. This practical competition involved setting up a distributed storage or file system on a defined HPC test environment – 10 storage servers and 24 compute nodes – within a limited time frame, followed by performance evaluation and targeted optimization using typical I/O workloads. After the selection phase last year, the group received an exclusive setup window in April 2025. Using BeeGFS as the parallel file system, they completed all tasks and optimized performance using targeted microbenchmarking. The award was presented at ISC 2025 in Hamburg – including a certificate and trophy, highlighting the success of this research-industry collaboration. (Contact: Sebsatian Oeste)

Digital twin for the mobility of the future

A digital twin for transportation is the central focus of the newly approved Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 408 (SFB/TRR 408) “AgiMo: Data-driven agile planning for responsible mobility”, jointly led by TU Dresden and TU Munich. The aim is to develop agile, data-supported planning methods for responsible mobility across all modes of transport. This includes mobility behavior as well as traffic management and new evaluation criteria based on the "4F principles" (function, form, fairness and forever). As an open source application, the planned digital twin will make current data and models accessible and enable evidence-based planning through participatory approaches involving key stakeholders. ZIH is contributing with a particular focus on the integration and provisioning of mobility data. The project has been funded by the DFG since May 2025. (Contact: Dr. Ralph Müller-Pfefferkorn)

Neural CPM and Morpheus at the ICML 2025

A joint paper by researchers from ZIH and Eindhoven University of Technology will be presented at this year’s International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), taking place from July 13–19, 2025, in Vancouver. The paper addresses a core methodological challenge in the simulation of biomechanical tissue models: accurately capturing interaction potentials that have traditionally been analytically elusive. The new Deep Neural Cellular Potts Model (CPM) approach uses a neural network trained directly on microscopy video data. The open-source software Morpheus, developed in the ZIH's Innovative Methods of Computing (IMC) group, was used as a reference. It will also make the new method accessible in a user-friendly way in the future. Unlike other neural networks, the Deep Neural CPM preserves physical and biological plausibility by embedding the network in the proven CPM formalism. (Contact: Dr. Lutz Brusch)

Biology and tumor research at workshops

Itwo researchers from the ZIH IMC group took part in international workshops on mathematical biology and cancer research. At the Cell Plasticity in Cancer Evolution workshop (May 19-22, 2025), Edwin Weinholtz presented a poster on graph-based analysis of cell-cell contacts in microscopy data – a project carried out in close collaboration with Prof. Peter Friedl (Nijmegen). Dr. Simon Syga also presented current research on the adaptability of cancer cells and its relevance for therapeutic strategies. The following week, Edwin Weinholtz also presented his poster at BioInference 2025 in Bardonecchia, Italy, addressing a wider audience focused on statistical modeling of biological systems. Both events provided valuable impetus for the further development of research approaches and and fostered international and interdisciplinary exchange. (Contact: Dr. Simon Syga)

Events

Softphone consultation hour: 07.07., 14.07., 21.07. and 28.07.2025 each 10:00-11:00 a.m.
Open Q&A session for users of the NHR@TUD computing cluster: 07.07., 14.07., 21.07. and on 28.07.2025 each 13:30-14:30 p.m.

http://www.tu-dresden.de/zih/veranstaltungen