Swiss Academic Compute Cloud (SwissACC) is an short project, serving as a funding bridge between the AAA/SWITCH program and the Information scientifique, accès, traitement et sauvegarde program of CRUS.

The project provides a range of services and know-how from over 10 AAA/SWITCH projects. The 14 SwissACC partners work on two main objectives:

• sustaining and preserving the research communities of the former AAA/SWITCH grid projects
• increasing user and usage numbers.

The project focuses on consolidating the services and simplifying the procedures that have been created to support Swiss communities. Its main goal is to free researchers from complex computational aspects of their research so they can focus on their core work.

Three pillars structure

• Provide abundant computational resources. Currently, these are mainly grid and cloud based resources that are hosted by project members.
• Establish a national collaborative distributed support (CDS) network.
• Support a large application portfolio. SwissACC is leading the transition to cloud technologies to faciliate the transparent integration of scientific applications, especially home-grown applications.

But it doesn’t stop here. SwissACC is creating a compelling portfolio of scientific applications, demonstrating a commitment to supporting every research field through an inclusive approach. The only constraints are: whether SwissACC’s current infrastructure can run the application efficiently and the amount of human resources it can allocate to ensure quality support. The current user base is mainly researchers from biology to physics. They are benefitting from a portfolio of around 20 scientific applications. Examples include computational backbone for research projects like the A4Mesh and SwissEx.