GMD is a member of the Association for Promoting a German Research Network e. V., or DFN Association. The business-administrative director of GMD, Dipl.-Kfm. Friedrich Winkelhage, is a member of its board.
GMD is a supporting member of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V..
GMD is one of the fifteen founding members of the European Software Institute (ESI), which is based in Bilbao, Spain. The objective of this joint initiative is to eliminate bottlenecks in software technology and to increase thereby the competitiveness of European enterprises. ESI's contact person at GMD is Prof. Dr. Stefan Jähnichen.
On 30 June 1994, GMD became a founding member of the Federation for Enterprise Knowledge Development Association, FEND, with headquarters in Bilbao. FEND's mission is to develop, evaluate, and distribute methods and techniques of business engineering. Its contact person at GMD is Dr. Ronald Tost.
In October 1992 GMD was accepted as the first non-Japanese member in the Real World Computing Partnership (RWCP), a ten-year program of the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) for laying the foundations of information technology in the twenty-first century. RWCP is the successor to the Fifth-Generation Computer Systems Project and is well regarded by the international scientific community. Contacts at GMD are Dr. Eckart Bierdümpel (Eckart.Bierduempel@gmd.de) in Sankt Augustin and Dr. Thomas Hagemann (Hagemann@gmd.co.jp) at GMD's office in Tokyo.
GMD and the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. jointly hold a national informatics competition with support from BMBF. The contact person at GMD is Ute Schütz.
GMD has signed a contract for cooperation with the Russian Academy of Science. GMD's contact person is Dr. Josef Schäfer (Josef.Schaefer@gmd.de, mats@gmd.de).
Together with other German research institutes, GMD has been cooperating for more than twenty years in a number of computer science areas with several institutions in Brazil. The foundations of this cooperation are a 1969 agreement between the governments of Germany and Brazil and a 1972 follow-up agreement ("Convenio") in the areas of mathematics and computer science between GMD (with BMBF) and Brazil's National Council of Research (CNPq). On the German side, the "German-Brazilian Cooperative Programme in Informatics" is coordinated on behalf of BMBF by Prof. Dr. Stefan Jähnichen (GMD.FIRST and the Technical University of Berlin). Two German-Brazilian workshops in 1993 (on 12-13 June in Berlin and 13-14 December in Rio de Janeiro) established that the bilateral program henceforth would focus on solving concrete problems in the "strategic" areas of ecology, telecommunications, and advanced automation. A number of common research projects were created and industrial participation was sought. The workshop proceedings, "Cooperative Research with Industrial Partners between Germany and Brazil" (Hrsg. José M. V. Castilho), were published jointly by CNPq, UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), and GMD. The next joint workshop is planned for December 1995. For more information, contact Dr. Gernot Richter of GMD's institute SET (Gernot.Richter@gmd.de).