ZIH-Info No. 191, August/September 2025
Table of contents
Editor: Jacqueline Papperitz
Softphone as standard telephone at the TUD
The University Executive Board has decided to use VolP-Softphone as the standard telephone solution at TU Dresden in future and to gradually replace ISDN-based telephony. Starting 1 September 2025, all newly requested, personalizable phone connections will by default be provided as softphones. Non-personalized telephones and justified exceptions will continue to receive centrally financed VolP desk phones from the ZIH. The previously agreed pilot phase for the introduction of the softphone as the standard telephone was successfully completed. The migration of existing ISDN connections will take place in several prioritized, building-based stages. The changeover will be communicated in multiple phases via IT advisors, managers, administrators, secretariats, and users. The aim is to complete the entire project - including the provision of softphones for existing VoIP hardphone users – by December 31, 2028. Further information: https://tu-dresden.de/intern/verwaltung/verwaltung-und-digitalisierung/softphone/. (Contact: )
New in the Self-Service Portal
TU Dresden's new intranet has been in operation since the beginning of August. In the self-service portal, team areas (https://selfservice.tu-dresden.de/services/intranet/space/start/) and access for guests https://selfservice.tu-dresden.de/services/intranet/request-access/start/) can be requested (ZIH login required for access). For all applications in the self-service portal, it is now also easier to submit a revised application after rejection: a new application can now be submitted directly, in which all fields are pre-filled with the original details. The reason for rejection is displayed so that corrections can be made in a targeted manner. Reviewers also receive a reference to the original application. The development of this function was part of the final project of one of our trainees at ZIH. (Contact: )
Trust for research: broad consent
As part of the BMFTR project DDtrust-scale, TU Dresden has implemented broad consent for the first time outside of medical research. This means that people agree to the use of their data for future, as yet unspecified research purposes. The consortium has thus reached an important milestone and taken a major step towards reusable research data while maintaining high data protection standards. This new form of consent was applied for the first time in a non-medical context during the now completed app-based mobility survey “Cities on the Move”. The fact that over 80% of participants in the study have already given their consent shows that rresponsibly designed processes are met with acceptance and trust. The project benefited from the close integration of the ZIH and Support Center Digitalization (SCD) stakeholders within the CIDS. In order to be able to use the pseudonymized data for scientific questions in the future, a legally sound concept and a powerful, scalable infrastructure are required. This is the focus of the ZIH's involvement in the DDtrust-scale project. The project is investigating the IT architectures, operating models and security mechanisms required to enable trust-based data usage in real-world operations. Further information: https://tu-dresden.de/cids/center/news/forschung-mit-vertrauen-und-weitblick. (Contact: Dr. Ralph Müller-Pfefferkorn)
Central JupyterHub for the NFDI community
The National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) aims to secure research data in the long term, make it accessible and usable. The basic service Jupyter4NFDI supports this project by standardizing the use of Jupyter notebooks in the NFDI consortia. Following the successful initialization phase, the two-year integration phase has now been approved, during which cooperation with the project partners will be further expanded. Servers at the ZIH were already successfully integrated into the service during the initialization phase in order to serve as a template for connecting further resources. Plans include an NFDI-wide login, integration with services such as MyBinder and FAIRJupyter as well as workshops and training materials for the community. The project is coordinated by Forschungszentrum Jülich. In addition to the ZIH, other partners involved include GESIS, the University of Stuttgart, MPCDF, GWDG, FIZ Karlsruhe and Chemnitz University of Technology. Further information: https://base4nfdi.de/projects/jupyter4nfdi. (Contact: Dr. Matthias Lieber)
HPC & AI against disinformation and propaganda
Language models such as Llama 3.3 (70B, meaning 70 billion model parameters) open up new possibilities for social science analyses, but place high demands on the computing infrastructure. The Computational Social Science group at SynoSys uses the high-performance computing system Cappella at the ZIH for this purpose. It investigates mechanisms of digital disinformation and propaganda on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter and TikTok using large language models. The focus is on political stakeholders and their communication. These models can also detect subtle patterns using detailed prompts such as us-versus-them narratives, simplifications and emotional language that appeals to anger or fear in a targeted manner. As such analyses require comparatively high computing resources, the group has four H100 GPUs and a GPU quota of 4,000 hours per month at its disposal on Capella. This allows 10 to 15 models to run simultaneously for 24 hours. Until now, social science research has rarely had access to such capacities and they enable highly scaled, nuanced analyses. The collaboration between the CIDS departments ZIH and SynoSys underlines how modern IT infrastructures promote innovative research beyond traditional fields of application. Further information: https://css-synosys.github.io. (Contact: Franziska Derkum, SynoSys)
Model reproducibility awarded with Morpheus
Reproducibility and reusability of model simulations are central principles of modern research, but are not yet a matter of course for multicellular models in the life sciences. The Morpheus modeling and simulation software developed at the ZIH (https://morpheus.gitlab.io) has now won several awards in this area. At the "Reproducibility Challenge" at the annual meeting of the Society for Mathematical Biology (Edmonton, Canada) in mid-July, an international team led by Dr. Simon Syga (ZIH Department of Innovative Computing Methods) demonstrated how an unknown model could be reproduced faster and more accurately with Morpheus than with other software tools. The winners of the international "OpenVT Reproducible Multicellular Model Competition" were also honored at this conference (https://MultiCellML.org). Models from current publications were evaluated according to the reproducibility of their simulation results and data analysis workflows. Behind the winning team from Utrecht University, a team of TUD researchers from the CRTD and the ZIH took second place with their model of the islets of Langerhans in zebrafish. The third-placed model from the University of Tübingen on the embryonic development of plants also used Morpheus – effectively earning the software an unofficial "constructor's prize". (Contact: Dr. Lutz Brusch)
ZIH Colloquium
A ZIH Colloquium with Dr. Roland Zimm from the École Normale Supérieure Lyon and Dublin City University will take place on Thursday, 21 August 2025 at 15:00 in Andreas-Pfitzmann-Bau (APB), Room 1096. Dr. Zimm will give a talk on the topic "Understanding the relationship between genotypes and complex phenotypes using multiscale numerical models". He will present two modeling frameworks that investigate the relationships between cellular mechanisms and phenotypic complexity in biological systems. Further information: https://tu-dresden.de/zih/kolloquium. (Contact: Dr. Hartmut Mix)
Events and lectures
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Softphone consultation hour: 11.08., 18.08., 25.08.2025 and 01.09., 08.09., 15.09., 22.09., 29.09.2025 each 10–11 a.m.
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Open Q&A session for users of the NHR@TUD computing clusters: 11.08., 18.08., 25.08.2025 and 01.09., 08.09., 15.09., 22.09., 29.09.2025 each 13:30–14:30
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19.08.2025: eLabFTW – Hands-On-Workshop (Electronic Lab Book), SLUB Open Science Lab (OSL)
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25–28.08.2025: Euro-Par Conference 2025 (BAR-Bau)