HELIX (funded by GSRT) is a convergence-building instrument for the coordination of research-oriented eInfrastructures in Greece. It is comprised of three independent and complementary entities – NNCRI, OpenAIRE-D and HELNET- that will respectively address the increasing horizontal “big computing” and “big data” needs of the Greek academic & research community and the emerging need for experimentally driven research.

Overall, it will form a single national ecosystem within which it will provide research and advisory services, support training activities, and offer relevant expertise on the combination of high-end communications, high-performance and high-throughput distributed computing, elastic cloud resource provisioning, and scalable data processing & analysis. It will facilitate data sharing and access to global knowledge across different research disciplines, scientific teams, and institutions, thereby contributing to interdisciplinary research, formation of inter-institutional virtual research team within Greece, and participation of Greek research facilities in virtual integrated facilities (including private research networks) with global scope. It will instrument several ‘as a Service’ offerings where part of the management capabilities is handed over to researchers, thereby facilitating innovation on novel frameworks delivering advanced researcher-controlled capabilities.

HELNET is a unified Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) infrastructure in the form of a unique, pan-Hellenic, federated, highly heterogeneous and large-scale experimental facility, which will offer “Testbeds as a Service” and will extend and improve the distributed FIRE installations around Greece (Univ. of Athens, NTUA, Univ. of Patras) led by the University of Thessaly and its widely recognized NITOS network experimentation testbed facility. The involved facilities, under the HELNET component, will be offering experimentation services based on cutting-edge networking equipment, thus enabling the experimental evaluation of innovative applications and protocols in the field of 4G/3G communications, WiFi networking, Software Defined Networking and Software Defined Radios. The HELNET experimental facility will empower innovation at national and international level and significantly upgrade the competitive advantage of the Greek institutions and facilities for the industrial development and innovation.

Project's website: http://helnet.eu/index.php/home-2/