HELIX is a collective effort of Athena RC and GRNET S.A., two research and technology bodies that lead the design and development of scientific infrastructures on an EU and national setting.
Athena RC is a Research Center focusing on cross-disciplinary and transformative data-intensive research. It champions the vision of the Data Economy, leads Open Access policies for research, nurtured the Open Data landscape, and supports innovators for our economic growth. Athena RC brings its experience in data catalogues and repositories, scientific data infrastructures, Big Data, and Data Science, to develop the software that powers HELIX.
GRNET is a stately owned private company with a single goal: to empower our Universities and Research Centers with the best possible hardware and networking infrastructures. GRNET provides the essential foundations for modern science, from super-fast connectivity, to cloud services, and supercomputing.
HELIX is currently funded by EU’s European Structural and Investment Funds allocated through the ‘Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation’ Operational Program of the Partnership Agreement 2014-2020. In incubation since 2012, the project officially started on January 2018, with the goal of implementing Phase 1 of HELIX.
Phase 1 delivers what we would call the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and intends to setup the basic technology and policy foundations, assemble the initial scientific user communities, educate about the necessity of Open Access, deliver a few lighthouse services to select scientific domains, and prepare the administrative and development priorities of Phases 2 and 3.
Estimated to start in January 2020, the Phase 2 of HELIX will scale out its services and expand its reach across more scientific domains, directly powering more current and future eInfrastructures for all of their data management, sharing, and reuse needs.
Phase 3 will mark the full operation of HELIX as a sustainable infrastructure for data-intensive research and innovation, providing its services to scientists, researchers, and the industry at large.
HELIX will help materialize the vision of our national Data Economy, promoting scientific advancement and economic growth.