Data science is an integral part of research in many fields, such as machine translation, speech recognition, robotics, search engines, digital economy, biological sciences, medical informatics, healthcare, social sciences and the humanities.

The knowledge related to this emerging interdisciplinary field is one of the leading tools in today’s industrial decision-making process. Having understood the importance and national relevance in the field of Data Science, the Board of Study in Statistics & Computer Science, Postgraduate Institute of Science (PGIS) has proposed to establish a “Data Science Unit” within the institute.

The Data Science Unit (DSU) provides on-demand access to High Performance Computing (HPC) services that support high-quality research for using supercomputers, parallel computing and/or computer clusters which are essential for dealing with large scale data. The services of this unit will help researchers to perform advanced computing tasks including modelling, data processing and analysis. We run a local cluster called “Pera” which provides facilities for postgraduate students and teaching staff of the Postgraduate Institute of Science. Those who need to access HPC resources have to register online or send an email to srimal@pgis.lk.