ETH – Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich

Founded in 1991, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS develops and promotes technical and scientific services for the Swiss research community in the fields of high-performance computing. The centre is located at Manno near Lugano, in the southern, Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. It is an autonomous unit of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich (ETH Zürich), the highest-ranking continental European university in a series of comparative studies between academic institutions worldwide.

CSCS enables world-class scientific research by pioneering, operating and supporting leading-edge supercomputing technologies. The centre deployed and operated the first Cray XT3 massively-parallel system in Europe and currently runs the largest European Cray installation, a XT5 machine ranked on position 23 of the TOP500 list of June 2009. The centre collaborates with domestic and foreign researchers, and carries out its own research in scientific computing. The current focus of these activities is a project called HP2C concentrating on developing petascale applications in more than a dozen research areas. The project is jointly coordinated by CSCS and the Institute of Computational Sciences at the University of Lugano and involves all major Swiss universities.

The HP2C project is an integral part of the Swiss national HPC strategy, a 115 M€ plan for accelerating the development of HPC-based sciences in Switzerland between 2009 and 2012. Besides HP2C, the strategy, which was adopted by the Swiss government in May 2009, comprises the construction of a new high-tech facility for CSCS as well as the development of the existing compute infrastructure at CSCS and the purchase of a leading-edge petascale supercomputer architecture in 2012.

CSCS’s main contribution to the 1IP project will be in the fields of training, petascale application development, future technologies in HPC and data centre design.