It is open to all Swiss researchers and their assistants, who can get free access to CSCS' supercomputers in a competitive scientific evaluation process.

In addition, the centre operates dedicated computing facilities for specific research projects and national mandates, e.g. weather forecasting.

Water for cooling the supercomputers is taken from Lake Lugano in 45m depth and pumped over a distance of 2.8 km to the centre.

In January 2008, the first operational high-resolution weather forecasting suite in Europe was taken in production on a massively-parallel supercomputer at CSCS.

In 2009, CSCS and the University of Lugano jointly launched the platform HP2C with the goal to prepare the application codes of Swiss researchers for upcoming supercomputer architectures.