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Background

It is often said that the life sciences are transforming into an information science. As laboratory experiments are starting to yield ever increasing amounts of data and the capacity to deal with those data is catching up, an increasing share of scientific activity is seen to be taking place outside the laboratories, sifting through the data and modelling “in-silico” the processes observed “in-vitro.” The transformation of the life sciences and similar developments in other disciplines have inspired a variety of initiatives around the world to create technical infrastructure to support the new scientific practices that are emerging. The e-Science programme in the United Kingdom and the NSF Office for Cyberinfrastructure are examples of these. In Switzerland there have been no such national initiatives. Yet, this has not prevented scientists from exploring the development of similar types of computing infrastructures. In …