CSC - IT Center for Science

CSC – IT Center for Science is a Finnish center of expertise in information technology owned by the Finnish state and higher education institutions. CSC provides internationally high-quality ICT expert services for higher education institutions, research institutes, culture, public administration and enterprises. CSC services has a wide group of users including researchers in environmental science, biosciences, linguistics, physics, chemistry and mathematical modeling, as well as social sciences and humanities. The users can take benefit of Finland’s widest selection of scientific software and databases, training and expert support, and storage and data services.

CSC is an important component to the Finnish Research Infrastructure Roadmap, hosting several national RIs of international importance including the national research network Funet, the energy efficient data centre Kajaani, and the HPC and Cloud computing facility,  the Finnish node of the biomedical computing infrastructure ELIXIR,  PRACE Finland,  a National Research Data Platform and the EuroHPC supercomputer LUMI.

LUMI is not only one of the world’s fastest computer systems but also one of the most advanced platforms for artificial intelligence. This investment by 10 European countries and the European Commission is hosted by CSC at its Kajaani data center providing the benefit of world-class environmental sustainability and cost-efficiency. It helps the European ICT sector become greener and more cost-efficient, which is necessary to reach the EU’s ambitious climate targets and pave the way for the green transition.

CSC is the driving force behind EUDAT and has played a central role in many other research data related European initiative and projects acting as coordinator or leader of areas of activities. Themes span across research data services, research infrastructures, high performance computing, data and thematic clouds. 

RDA and RDA Europe is one of such initiatives.  The first RDA Europe project director, Dr. Leif Laaksonen, also a CSC Director at the time, was part of the founding group to drive the launch of the RDA in Gothenburg in March 2013. 

CSC has since lead the first phase of the RDA Europe and was a key contributor in the follow-up RDA Europe projects. It has also coordinated  the CSC Finnish RDA National Node activities, raising awareness of the global RDA work and the recommendations and outputs and was a co-organiser of the RDA 14th Plenary held in Helsinki (October 2019). 

Within the RDA context CSC leverages the grass-roots work of the various groups developing solutions for international open science, infrastructure and data sharing efforts like EOSC while channeling developments also at national level through fora like the EOSC Finnish Forum.