The missing piece between research and IT: Scientific IT Services at ETH Zurich
Dr. Thomas Wüst (Scientific IT Services, ETH Zürich, Switzerland)

The process of modern scientific inquiry demands for ever larger and more powerful computational resources of increasing complexity. This trend poses a significant challenge for the researchers and the University IT departments alike since often both of them lack the necessary expertise or time to design required usage patterns or fully exploit the potential of available and new technologies. The call for a solution to this suboptimal situation has become most urgent, above all, in the life sciences and other traditional, quantitative research domains but, more recently, also in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Scientific IT Services (SIS), a newly founded division within the IT services of ETH Zurich, aims at filling this gap. SIS provides IT solutions for compute- and data-intensive research, ranging from high-performance and cloud computing, over data analysis and workflow management, to training in writing good computer codes. In this talk, I will give insight into the services of SIS and present selected use cases, the working (or business) model of SIS and possible future direction. The presentation is intended for researchers and PIs of any research discipline requiring substantial computational means as well as for academic IT departments.