Research infrastructures are a prerequisite for the performance of high-quality research. By providing high-quality facilities, resources and services available to researchers, partners and companies, research infrastructures ensure that science is driven by excellence.

Research Infrastructures of Institutions

Here are a few emblematic examples, among many others.

Luxembourg Hydrogen Valley

LuxHyVal’s hydrogen ecosystem is poised to significantly contribute to decarbonising Luxembourg’s industrial hydrogen consumption. By utilising 100% renewable electricity, the project will produce green hydrogen locally and implement initiatives across the entire value chain. This includes local production, utilisation, storage, and distribution to industrial and mobility end-users, all while integrating with existing and planned infrastructures. A six-megawatt electrolyser facility at the heart of Luxembourg Hydrogen Valley is planned to be built in Bascharage’s industrial park.

Luxembourg National Data Service

Luxembourg National Data Service (LNDS) is an economic interest group created by the Luxembourg Government, to implement Luxembourg’s strategies in research, innovation, and digitalisation. LNDS enables value creation from secondary use of data, for public and private partners and supports the sharing and re-use of public sector data, in a trustable manner.

The LNDS service portfolio includes know-how, capabilities, tools, infrastructure, and data services. The services are developed together with data partners, through concrete data projects. Through efficient & responsible use of data and improving the secondary use of data, LNDS will support the acceleration of economic, ecological, and societal transitions.

Integrated Biobank of Luxembourg (IBBL)

IBBL (Integrated BioBank of Luxembourg) is an institute organised within the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) and dedicated to supporting biomedical research for the benefit of patients. They provide biospecimen-related services and a biobanking infrastructure for applied medical research.

Transversal Translational Medicine

Transversal Translational Medicine (TTM) at the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) aims to enhance and develop translational initiatives in biomedical research and beyond, using the Luxembourgish National Centre for Excellence in Research on Parkinson’s disease (NCER-PD) and ParkinsonNet Luxembourg as a blueprint. TTM fosters bed-to-bench-to-bed collaborations within LIH, inter-institutionally across Luxembourg and internationally, supported by specific platforms and infrastructures bridging between fundamental research and real-world healthcare.

Data Centre

The Data Centre, hosted by LISER, aims to collect data for scientific studies in order to make them available to researchers, political actors and other partners in society. Thanks to its expertise in survey methodologies and statistics, the Data Centre is a unique actor in Luxembourg for researchers and decision-makers in the development of research projects and actions on the field.
It offers a referenced and trusted platform with tools and services that enables both data producers and data users to easily share, find and access reusable and interoperable data. This is turn addresses the increasing needs of open science while being compliant with security, integrity and privacy of information at stake.

The Behavioural and Experimental Economics Centre

LISER’s Centre for behavioural and experimental economics has the objective to:

• Generate first-class academic research that can be of interest not only to academic researchers, but also to national and international policymakers. To pursue this objective, the Centre’s is establishing long-term partnerships with public- and private-sector players that will allow researchers to co-produce research with non-academic partners and to pursue activities of grant-seeking.
• Broaden the spectrum of experimental methods at LISER by creating a platform to conduct large-scale online experiments, using members of the general population resident in Luxembourg as research participants.
• Maximise international visibility by positioning the Centre and LISER within a rich academic network, comprised of international centres of excellence in experimental and behavioural economics.

Research Facilities

Luxembourg Learning Centre

The Luxembourg Learning Centre (LLC) is an open and innovative space intended to support and inspire its users to reach their goals. This innovative infrastructure and the personalised services create a stimulating learning environment oriented towards the digital needs in learning and science.

High Performance Computing

Meluxina

Luxembourg’s first supercomputer MeluXina installed in LuxConnect’s Data Center DC2, which is powered by green energy from Kiowatt, a cogeneration plant fuelled by waste wood. The computing power of MeluXina will be a petascale supercomputer, capable of executing more than 10 Petaflops, 10 million billion calculations per second.

MeluXina is dedicated to applications in research, personalised medicine and eHealth projects, but also to the needs of companies, in particular SMEs and start-ups. In order to facilitate access to the use of Meluxina’s capabilities, a specific skills centre will guide and support companies with limited skills in this area.

The Luxembourg supercomputer joins the European network of EuroHPC supercomputers, an initiative headquartered in Luxembourg and co-financed by the European Commission and 27 countries, which aims to provide Europe with an ecosystem and a computing infrastructure.

AION

The High Performance Computing system is used to conduct research in the fields of computer science, materials physics, bio-medicine and life sciences, cryptology and artificial intelligence, as well as digital history and socio-economic simulations.

LIST’s High Performance Computing

LIST’s High Performance Computing (HPC) facility mainly supports internal research projects teams in solving advanced and complex computation problems.

The HPC facility consists of a Linux compute cluster, with centralized storage, backup facilities and management infrastructure.

Space

LunaLab

The LunaLab is a lunar analogue facility that consists of a close structure of 11×7 meters filled with 20 tons of basalt to try to emulate the surface of the moon. It is equipped with 12 cameras of a motion capture system and 3 IP cameras to register the experiments. The Laboratory is illuminated with a cinema lamp hanging from a ceiling rail that permits to change the amount, the location and direction of the illumination. The purpose of this illumination is to generate a similar illumination to the polar regions of the Moon that is between 3 and 6 degrees. The experiments performed in this Lab are focused on the use of lunar mobile robotic systems and developed algorithms for autonomous navigation, localisation, trajectory planning and control for the rover itself and for other robotics tools, such as a robotic arms or a robotic drilling systems, focusing on activities related to space resources search, detection, localisation, identification, manipulation and transportation.

Concurrent Design Facility

The Concurrent Design Facility is a dedicated space for concurrent engineering, a work methodology that is replacing the traditional sequential design practices. Due to its proven advantages in cost, schedule and accuracy, the concurrent approach is being adopted and applied in space agencies like ESA and NASA, and private companies such as Airbus.

Zero-G Lab

The Zero-G Lab is designed to allow students and researchers to test the movement of in-orbit robotics, satellites and other spacecrafts in a micro-gravity environment – similar in concept to an air hockey platform.

6GSpace Lab

Satellite communications allow data transmission even in the most remote places on Earth. They let us gather remote data about the Earth and connect with each other, and are constantly evolving to enable an increasing number of applications and more throughput-demanding services. The University of Luxembourg conducts a large number of research projects in satellite communications, several of which are funded by ESA and conducted in cooperation with industry partners.

The 6GSpace Lab gives researchers and students the opportunity to test and validate their algorithms in conditions that reflect the challenges and constraints of real-world communications platforms. It explores research topics such as precoded downlink beams, ISL data/payload synchronisation and DVB-S2/5G NR communication standards. It also provides students with the opportunity to test their self-designed communication transceivers with a real-time communications testbed for CubeSats with its customisable LEO channel emulator.

Mobility

360Lab

The first thematic research laboratory focusing on smart mobility, it serves as an umbrella for research projects sharing common equipment and complementary expertise, to conduct strategic and collaborative research in the broader area of mobility innovation.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Autonomous Systems, V2X Communications, Artificial Intelligence for Automated Mobility, Security and Resilience of Automotive Systems, Sensing Technologies, Mobility Modeling and Simulation, and Transportation Planning.

AeRoLab

A 5x5x5m flight arena comprising a fleet of multicopters and different types of sensors. This lab, which is equipped with a motion capture system, allows the testing, evaluation and validation of autonomous navigation approaches on applications such as perception, state estimation, control and trajectory planning.

Radar Lab

Growing demand for enhanced processing algorithms in modern radar systems requires prototyping capabilities already in the research stage. In fact, the faster a researcher can transition a concept from design to a working prototype, the earlier the system will be able to leverage the benefits offered by its new capabilities. Currently, researchers are relying more and more on software defined radios (SDR) to compress the time to prototype.

Data visualisation

Visualisation wall

Hosted in LIST, the Visualisation Wall offers a cutting-edge environment for large-scale interactive data visualisation. It consists of a huge high-resolution display with 50 million pixels to accommodate unprecedented amounts of data using multiple synchronised data visualisations.

Materials

Composite Manufacturing Platform

LIST’s Composite Manufacturing Platform provides pre-industrial research infrastructure and key skills in the field of composite materials, including polymer processing, the manufacture and welding of structural composites, and analysis and testing of composite materials.

The purpose of the platform is to further fuel the development and processing of innovative materials.

The Materials Characterisation and Testing Platform

The Materials Characterisation and Testing Platform supports both research and companiesby:

• Providing a unique and optimum combination of advanced characterisation facilities and mechanical testing to respond to the needs of internal and external researchers and industries,
• Developing and maintaining leading-edge expertise and methodologies in characterisation and mechanical testing.

Biotechnologies and environment

Biotechnologies and Environmental Analytics Platform

From bioprocesses and water quality to food safety and plant biology, the Biotechnologies and Environmental Analytics Platform offers cutting-edge equipment and expertise in analytical chemistry, omics technologies and bioprocessing to scientists, industry and public stakeholders.

Observatory for Climate, Environment and Biodiversity (OCEB)

The OCEB infrastructures host and maintain structured databases that are key for various end-users (such as private engineering offices, Luxembourgish and European decision- and policy-makers, or other stakeholders) to be informed on environmental and ecological changes across the Critical Zone.

Connected objects

Development of Technologies around Connected Objects Platform

A set of skills and technologies around connected objects including natural interfaces, 3D printing, sensors and artificial intelligence, enabling designers to translate their ideas for new products and services with a specific focus on group decision-making, solving complex problems, skills assessment, and collaborative design.

CommLab

The Communication Laboratory (CommLab) is used for research and testing of signal processing techniques for both satellite and terrestrial communication systems. Activities carried out in this facility are mostly focused on wireless communication systems to test and validate digital signal processing algorithms, while facing real implementation issues and constraints on real-time hardware platforms.

Computer Vision Lab

This lab provides state-of-the-art facilities for controlled measurements, testing, and validation, essential to support experimental research in computer vision and imaging.

Research activities are focused on 3D sensing and analysis, with applications ranging from security to assistive computer vision for healthcare.

European Platforms

EATRIS- (European Advanced Translational Research Infrastructure in Medicine)

EATRIS is a European Infrastructure owned by its member states, of which Luxembourg is one.
Its focus is on translation medicine (bench to bed and back) and it has a patient-centric approach.

EATRIS provides the following process-oriented benefits to all member states: regulatory guidance, training opportunities, industry/academic collaboration and validation of tools and technologies.

ELIXIR (European Advanced Translational Research Infrastructure in Medicine)

ELIXIR is the European research infrastructure for data in life sciences, providing access to data resources, tools and training around research. It has been acknowledged as one of the three most strategically relevant research infrastructures in Europe. Its Luxembourgish Node is hosted at the LCSB.

ELIXIR-LU is dedicated to “give life to biomedical data”, offering long-term sustainability of tools and data for biomedical research. ELIXIR-LU aims to facilitate long-term access by providing an open-access as well as a controlled access data hub for research data and offers tools for scientists in both academia and industry. On the national level, we also support electronic data capture, management, analysis and archiving, including GDPR compliance tools.

ESRIC

ESRIC is a unique place where technologies, businesses and people meet to drive the future of space resources utilisation in support of space exploration and the creation of an in-space economy.

Based in Luxembourg, ESRIC fosters innovation and growth in the space resources industry by providing access to top class research facilities and business expertise.

ESRIC connects leading academic, industrial and entrepreneurial talents in the field of space resource utilisation. The technologies and business ideas that this inspiring and creative environment generates will help to build a strong, self-sustaining in-space economy with a truly global reach.

PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe)

PRACE, an international non-profit association, seeks to enhance European competitiveness in HPC for the benefit of society by offering persistent world-class HPC services and data management resources for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. Each of the member countries of this association has to select a representative organisation with the aim of helping the development of a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure.

Due to its reputation and national expertise in the HPC and Big Data domains, the University of Luxembourg has received the support from all public research centres in Luxembourg and has been chosen by the Ministry for Higher Education and Research (MESR) to represent the country within PRACE.

DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities)

DARIAH is a large research infrastructure aiming to enhance and support digitally enabled research and teaching across the Arts and Humanities. DARIAH is a network of people, expertise, information, knowledge, content, methods, tools and technologies from its member countries. It develops, maintains and operates an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices and sustains researchers in using them to build, analyse and interpret digital resources. By working with communities of practice, DARIAH brings together individual state-of-the-art digital arts and humanities activities and scales their results to a European level. It preserves, provides access to and disseminates research that stems from these collaborations and ensures that best practices, methodological and technical standards are followed.

Luxembourg is one of the founding members of the DARIAH infrastructure, which currently has 17 member countries.

SHARE (The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe)

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a research infrastructure for studying the effects of health, social, economic and environmental policies over the life-course of European citizens and beyond. From 2004 until today, 380,000 in-depth interviews with 140,000 people aged 50 or older from 28 European countries and Israel have been conducted. Thus, SHARE is the largest pan-European social science panel study providing internationally comparable longitudinal micro data which allow insights in the fields of public health and socio-economic living conditions of European individuals.
In Luxembourg, the survey is possible thanks to the financial support of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the technical involvement of the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)