A plan to set up an institute for software in data intensive sciences

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 gaining in complexity and size too. Unfortunately the role and career path of scientists and engineers working on software R&D and developing scientific software is 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 de-fragmented into individual initiatives. To address the above issues we propose an effort on an European level, which concentrates on strengthening the role of software developers in natural sciences, acts as a hub for exchange of ideas among different stakeholders in computer science and scientific software and forms a lobbying forum for software engineering in natural sciences on an international level.