A Software Institute for Data-Intensive Sciences, Joining Computer Science Academia and Natural Science Research

With the ever-increasing size of scientific collaborations and complexity of scientific instruments, the software needed to acquire, process and analyze the gathered data is increasing in both complexity and size. Unfortunately the role and career path of scientists and engineers working on software R&D and developing scientific software are neither clearly established nor defined in many fields of natural science. In addition, the exchange of information between scientific software development and computer science departments at universities or computing schools is scattered and fragmented into individual initiatives. To address the above issues we propose a new effort on a European level, which concentrates on strengthening the role of software developers in natural sciences, acts as a hub for the exchange of ideas among different stake-holders in computer science and scientific software and forms a lobbying forum for software engineering in natural sciences on an international level. This contribution discusses in detail the motivation, role and interplay with other initiatives of a “Software Institute for Data-Intensive Sciences”, which is currently being discussed between research institutes, universities and funding agencies in Europe. In addition to the current status, an outlook on future prospects of this initiative will be given.