The Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC), which opened in 2017 and specializes in data science, has announced its expansion with the opening of a new center, in addition to the EPFZ and EPFL centers. The ETH Council approved a 5 million budget increase for the data science field to fund the new structure. The third center will be established in Aargau within the Paul Scherrer Institute which specializes in research in the fields of matter, materials, energy and the environment, as well as human health. “This new unit will help further bridge the gap between data scientists and field scientists, while responding to the great explosion in scientific data collected by the large-scale research infrastructure in Switzerland,” explains Olivier Verschor, Director of SDSC.

Artificial intelligence to process scientific data

The Paul Scherrer Institute estimates that over the next four years its research infrastructure will generate more than 50 petabytes per year compared to 3.6 petabytes today. This particularly sharp increase can be explained by the planned modernization of the Source de Lumière Suisse (Study of the properties of materials using synchrotron light), by the regular commissioning of the SwissFEL free X-ray laser, as well as by the fields of life sciences and environmental sciences, which work a lot on Photo and video basis.

The data science resources and expertise at SDSC will improve the assessment and processing of large data volumes for PSI, as well as other federal research institutes (EMPA, WSL, Eawag). The new architecture also aims to expand the SDSC cooperation with the Swiss Supercomputer Center in Lugano, which will host one of the most powerful computers in the world within a few years.