DataThings co-founder and head of operations Grégory Nain provides an update on the LuxProvide partnership and sets his sights on niche national infrastructures abroad.
As announced last July, Luxembourg’s HPC provider, LuxProvide, and DataThings, a University of Luxembourg SnT spinoff company launched in 2017, aimed to leverage resources and know-how on both sides, ultimately to help businesses with their operational scaling up, with DataThings gaining access to MeluXina’s processing power.
It was expected that GreyCat—DataThings’ core technology, which promises performance through live data analytics and machine learning—would integrate with the supercomputer, allowing for the processing of much larger data sets.
So how’s the partnership progressing?
For the time being, “the things we want to deploy there have some specific needs that are somewhat in between all the offers LuxProvide has in their catalogue,” Nain says. The DataThings co-founder added that they’re working closely with the provider to determine precisely how GreyCat could be leveraged. Based on discussions, “We figured that the solution that was envisioned was probably not appropriate for the technicalities of the problem… but they are currently working on a solution to accommodate this.”
“All applications that would be developed on GreyCat would be natively Meluxina-ready.”
Grégory Nain, Head of Operations at DataThings
Partnership potential
Nain emphasises the delay is purely due to technical aspects, and the two entities are working together to find a solution. “Deploying on the HPC side was not appropriate because there wouldn’t be any user interface that people could interact with,” explains Nain. “The offer on the cloud didn’t have enough resources to properly host the application, so we need something in between.”
In a nutshell: performance relies on the processing power of HPC, yet users will need to visualise results and interact with the system somehow.
When the partnership reaches its full potential, Nain says it’ll be a win-win: on one hand, even on a smaller infrastructure, like a simple computer, machine learning and data analytics can be developed. Furthermore, “all applications that would be developed on GreyCat would be natively Meluxina-ready… and the day they want to scale up, we can knock on the door at LuxProvide and leverage the HPC.”
When it launched, DataThings anticipated that GreyCat could replace solutions like Oracle and others. The team spent the first three years creating references and applications for clients. Then, in 2020, with the investment of Paul Wurth and Encevo (the parent company of Creos, among others), DataThings was able to create products and produce software, going beyond just its servicing activities.
Niche markets
Nain sees a lot of promise in the smart grid AI twin ALVA, for instance, which was developed collaboratively between Creos and DataThings. As Silicon Luxembourg previously reported, this digital twin allows Creos to ensure a stable energy supply through network optimisation and predicting issues that could arise.
Using GreyCat for ALVA is “quite a niche market,” Nain explains, but it could also be a sweet spot for the made-in-Luxembourg technology to make its mark worldwide, as there is a limited number of similar distribution operators, globally speaking. “It might not seem like a lot, but they are national infrastructures, so the investments behind can be significant. Each sale will be a significant one.”
Nain says he can’t imagine developing a solution like ALVA in any other country in the world. “In 10 years, we managed to develop a solution that would be needed for all electricity distribution companies in the world,” Nain states, “and at the moment none of our competitors can scale at the level we’re doing with Creos.”
