The department is part of the European Interferometry Initiative, part of the European Network Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes, and is part of the Spitzer Legacy Programme "The formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems: Placing our Solar System in Context". It is involved in international instrument projects such as MIDI, Planet Finder, Herschel, and JWST. The theory group of the PSF department owns together with the theory group of the Galaxies and Cosmology department the PIA cluster, a 256 processors supercomputer situated at the Rechenzentrum Garching.