Photo: Leigh Prather/Shutterstock
Per Öster, Director of Research Environments at CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd. Photo: Terje Heiestad
Pentti Pulkkinen, Director of the Management Support Unit at the Academy of Finland and chair of the NeIC. Photo: Terje Heiestad
The Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC)
Development towards new scientific fields Cooperation on e-Infrastructure began at CERN and thus with high-energy physics. But research evolves over time, and the need for electronic infrastructures has expanded to other scientific fields. Per Öster is Director of Research Environments at CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd, which operates and develops e-Infrastructure in Finland. He explains: – It is obvious to all countries that this joint effort through the NeIC has really paid off. It has accelerated discoveries in the field of high-energy physics, e.g. the Higgs Particle. Now we see rapidly growing needs for
data analysis in the biosciences, humanities and earth sciences, etc. Under this agreement between the Nordic countries, we can help the researchers to become more efficient and productive. The research councils have set the level of ambition high. The Chair of the NeIC board agrees – Our vision is to include more areas in the cooperation. We have begun to work with the biosciences, and soon it may be the humanities that have new needs. There is a need for e-Infrastructures in all scientific fields. So it will be extremely interesting to see – and impossible to predict – where the future is going to take us, says Dr Pulkkinen.
23
– Farsighted research councils in the Nordic countries have understood that it takes a long time to develop eInfrastructures. Thus the NeIC, together with partners in the Nordic region, can continue to facilitate joint solutions and help researchers work together more efficiently. Future priority areas will include solutions for sharing data and computational resources, solutions that provide support to Nordic research initiatives, and joint solutions for administering Nordic participation in international research infrastructures. Gudmund Høst, Director of the NeIC