While we are witnessing a transition from petascale to exascale computing, we experience, when teaching students and scientists to adopt distributed computing infrastructures for computational sciences, what Geoffrey A. Moore once coined the chasm between the visionaries in computational sciences and the early majority of scientific pragmatists. Using the EU-funded DRIHM project (Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology) as a case study, we see that innovative research infrastructures have difficulties to be accepted by the scientific pragmatists: The infrastructure services are not yet “mainstream”. Excellence in workforces in computational sciences, however, can only be achieved if the tools are not only available but also used. In this paper we show for DRIHM how the chasm exhibits and how it can be crossed.
