Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

Computing as a research contribution

CSCS operates high-performance computing and data infrastructure for research. Founded in Manno in 1991 and later relocated to Lugano, it is an organizational part of ETH Zurich. Its research allocations and contractual services are distinct access routes, rather than an unrestricted free cloud for all users. [1][2]

CSCS also co-developed Apertus with ETH Zurich and EPFL, with training on its Alps supercomputer. The public 8B and 70B weights and associated development materials make this a model-research contribution as well as a provision of computing resources. [3]

The 8B instruction-tuned checkpoint is downloadable under Apache 2.0. That artifact license should not be read as a claim that all source training content has identical rights. [4]

In July 2026, the partners announced Apertus 1.5, adding image and audio understanding to the project’s text-model work. CSCS also introduced an inference service for its users and the Swiss academic community. This institutional access route is distinct from making model files downloadable. [5]