ZIH Info No. 199, July/August 2026

Groundbreaking Ceremony for Future CIDS Building

With the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone, construction of the future CIDS building on the TU Dresden campus has reached an important milestone. In the new research building south of Nöthnitzer Straße, up to 600 employees of the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Sciences (CIDS) will work in a space of approximately 11,000 square meters. The Free State of Saxony and the European Union are investing approximately 101 million euros in the project. The new building is being constructed in the immediate vicinity of the Faculty of Computer Science and the data center, which opened in 2015, and will complement it with modern workspaces, research facilities, and communal areas. Together, the two buildings—named in honor of computer science pioneer N. J. Lehmann—will create optimal conditions for digital infrastructures and research-oriented IT services, as well as interdisciplinary research and scientific collaboration in the field of digitalization. Completion is scheduled for 2029. For more information: https://tud.link/9bfswt. (Contact: Jacqueline Papperitz)

Storage Infrastructure Upgrade

In June 2026, the ZIH successfully completed the long-term migration of its in-house Ceph environment to new hardware and software. All data had already been migrated to modern servers from xFusion in February. At the same time, the NFS service was updated and an upgrade to the latest Ceph version was performed. For additional support with the Ceph software, the ZIH has entered into a maintenance contract with Clyso. This guarantees rapid support in the event of any issues. In addition, a framework agreement for Ceph hardware ensures that the ZIH is optimally positioned to provide a scalable and highly capable storage service for research data. (Contact: , Tel.: HA -40000)

Improvement to Softphone Call Lists

Since the update to the Cisco phone system in June 2026, missed calls are now saved in a softphone’s call log even when users are logged out. This feature addresses a need that many users expressed during the pilot phase of the softphone rollout. The softphone rollout project is proceeding according to plan. Further information is available on the TUD intranet: https://intranet.tu-dresden.de/spaces/GovernanceITundDigitalisierung/pages/466845712/Softphone. A Matrix room is also available for internal TUD discussions on using the softphone: https://matrix.to/#/#softphone:tu-dresden.de. The Service Desk remains the central point of contact for service requests. (Contact: , Tel.: HA -40000)

ZIH Participates in EOSC Node Germany

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the collaborative project “Building up EOSC Node Germany,” coordinated by the NFDI Secretariat. The project, funded from August 1, 2026, through December 31, 2027, brings together ten German research and infrastructure institutions. Within the consortium, led by CDIO Prof. Lars Bernard, TU Dresden is coordinating the “Storage Federation” use case, which is being implemented at ZIH in collaboration with RWTH Aachen University. The goal of the project is to establish EOSC Node Germany as the central German access point to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation. This will connect research data, services, and infrastructures from Germany to the European research data landscape, facilitating their sustainable use and cross-border exchange. At the heart of the use case coordinated by TUD is the development of a federated storage infrastructure that connects geographically distributed storage resources via standardized interfaces, thereby enabling flexible data mobility and sustainable research data management. This creates a central technical foundation for FAIR-compliant and data-intensive research within the EOSC Federation. (Contact: Dr. Matthias Lieber)

Award for Mixed-Precision Research at ZIH

Researchers at ZIH were honored with a Best Emerging Paper Award at the International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE). The award-winning position paper, “A Taxonomy of Application Properties for Mixed-Precision Autotuning,” was led by Gülçin Gedik, who is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at ZIH as an NHR fellow. Together with two colleagues from the ZIH energy efficiency research group, she investigated systematic approaches for identifying scientific applications suitable for mixed-precision autotuning. The work focuses on key application properties, such as runtime behavior, numerical requirements, and hardware configurations. These factors determine whether reducing numerical precision is appropriate—with the goal of lowering energy consumption and better balancing computational power in HPC systems. With their approach, the authors describe a method that makes it possible to assess in advance whether software is suitable for mixed-precision optimizations. In doing so, they make a valuable contribution to performance engineering and to the promotion of energy-efficient high-performance computing solutions at ZIH. Further information: https://doi.org/10.1145/3777911.3801102. (Contact: Dr. Robert Schöne)

Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2026

At the 64^th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Zhan Qu and Prof. Michael Färber from ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig were honored with the Outstanding Paper Award. Their award-winning paper, “MediEval: A Unified Medical Benchmark for Patient-Contextual and Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning in LLMs,” addresses the question of how reliably large language models can support medical decision-making. In clinical practice, medical knowledge alone is not enough: recommendations must also be tailored to a patient’s individual situation. To this end, the researchers developed a benchmark that evaluates whether language models correctly link medical expertise with patient-specific information. Unlike many previous benchmarks, MediEval assesses not only medical knowledge but also whether models correctly interpret individual patient contexts. The analysis results show that models can make safety-critical errors—even when the underlying medical knowledge is correct. This work thus contributes to the development of trustworthy AI for clinical use. Further information: https://scads.ai/acl-2026/. (Contact: Prof. Michael Färber)

20 Years of Digital Infrastructure at TU Dresden

On June 17, the ZIH celebrated its 20th anniversary at TUD. The anniversary event provided an opportunity to recognize the ZIH’s evolution from a university computer center to a key player in the digital research ecosystem. In welcoming remarks from the academic and political spheres, as well as in expert presentations, the growing importance of powerful digital infrastructures for research, teaching, and administration was highlighted. The focus was on the development of university information infrastructures from the center’s early days to its current role within the scientific ecosystem. Particular emphasis was placed on the interplay between infrastructure, methodological development, and research, as well as the importance of long-term collaborations as the foundation of modern data-driven science. A panel discussion with representatives from academia and politics then addressed the prospects for digital research infrastructures, technological sovereignty, and future models of collaboration. Further information: https://tu-dresden.de/zih/news/jubilaeum-20-jahre-zih. (Contact: Jacqueline Papperitz)

Events

Softphone consultation hour: 11./18.05. as well as 01, 08, 15, 22 and 29.06.2026, each 10:00–11:00 a.m. (online)
Open Q&A session for users of the NHR@TUD computing cluster: 11./18.05. and 01, 08, 15, 22 and 29.06.2026, each 13:30–14:30 (online)
July 21, 2026, 3:45–6:00 p.m.: ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig Meetup goes Dresden – Networking in Dresden’s AI Community (ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, Strehlener Straße)
August 6, 2026, 4:40 p.m.: From Understanding Language to Assisting Humans: Context-Aware AI for Communication and Software (APB, online)
August 19, 2026, 2:50–4:20 p.m.: #1 Shift Your Perspective – Bias in the Design and Creation of Digital Bodies, Worlds, and Futures (Merkelbau)
September 3–4, 2026, 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.: Resilient AI: Securing Large Language Models (ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, Strehlener Str.)

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