Facilitating greater levels of collaboration between scientists and medical researchers in Europe and the U.S. is the goal of an announcement by information technology leaders from Technische Universität Dresden (TUD), Germany and Indiana University (IU). The formal agreement of friendship and cooperation between the two universities will impact joint research in high performance computing and informatics.

The first collaborative project between TUD and IU involves the development of new approaches to biological data set management and trans-Atlantic data transfer. As part of the new agreement, IU and TUD will collaboratively seek funding in both the U.S. and the European Union in order to advance their work on data architectures.

Partners in the agreement include the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at TUD and the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI), and School of Informatics at IU.

"This partnership formalizes a longstanding friendship and will enable us to be more effective in innovation to support a variety of research fields," said ZIH Director, Wolfgang Nagel.

"IU and PTI are doing work related to data management that holds significant value both within the state of Indiana and internationally," said Craig Stewart, executive director of PTI. "In ZIH, we have an international partner that complements IU's strengths and allows us to be even stronger and more ambitious in our research efforts."

Announcement of the agreement comes as IU technologists are visiting Dresden, Germany to work with ZIH on a project to optimize trans-Atlantic data transfers between Germany and the U.S. using IU's high performance data storage system, the Data Capacitor. Together, the international team is developing new approaches to managing data sets, with special emphasis on those from the biological sciences.

"Effective trans-Atlantic data transfer is a significant challenge that we are working to address collaboratively using the Data Capacitor," said Stephen Simms, Data Capacitor project lead from IU. "Having the ability to quickly access very large data sets across the Atlantic greatly expands the potential for successful international research collaboration and new scientific and medical discoveries."

IU and ZIH have a long history of collaboration, including winning together three major computing challenge awards at the international SuperComputing conference sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery. The most recent victory was in 2008, when a team made up of informatics students from the PTI Open Systems Lab and students from TUD won a competition to most effectively run a set of scientific computer applications on a small supercomputer cluster. This new formal agreement grew out of a visit by Craig Stewart to ZIH as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 2006.