The Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) fosters computational science and data processing at scale through a dedicated investment in application software development and related computational tools. PASC is coordinated by CSCS in close collaboration with Swiss universities, including ETH Zurich and EPF Lausanne.
The platform overarching goal for the 2025 to 2028 period is to strengthen Swiss computational sciences in the exascale era, application driven machine learning, and to ensure application readiness leading to allocations on the Alps infrastructure at CSCS, on EuroHPC platforms (e.g. LUMI, in which Switzerland owns a share), and other Tier 0 systems. Through PASC, HPC competence is fostered at Swiss universities, and CSCS obtains valuable insight to develop its next generation of systems. Specifically, PASC will invest in the development, availability and quality of application software and frameworks that are performant on GPUs, portable, scalable and sustainable. PASC strongly encourages open development and open source licensing.
PASC is organized in the following pillars:
- The Project pillar as a a bottom-up initiative based on 4-yearly calls. The projects are led by Principal Investigators form Swiss research institutions and are reviewed every three years with a final report. The funding supports researchers and software developers, only a small amount of computational resources at CSCS to support co-design and development is included . The main goal is to develop tools to address specific computational challenges in domain sciences. The projects are interdisciplinary, jointly developed by domain scientists, computational researchers and software developers.
- The Core Program pillar as a top-down initiative based on a master plan proposed by the Program Director. In its scope a number of libraries and tools to support different scientific applications able to run on different hardware architectures are developed. About 50% of the available PASC funding is allocated to this activity.
- The Training & Outreach pillar composed by
- the Swiss Graduate Program Foundations in Mathematics and Informatics for Computer Simulations in Science and Engineering (FOMICS). FOMICS is coordinated by the Institute of Computational Sciences of the USI, together with the University of Basel, Bern, Geneva, EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS; it is supported through means from the Swiss University Conference doctoral program. The program is open to other participation at the condition they bear their own costs.
- a yearly Summer School jointly organized by CSCS and USI.
- the PASC Conference that takes place yearly and is supported by ACM SIGHPC.