Luxembourg’s supercomputer MeluXina is a cornerstone of the country’s digital transformation strategy and a key enabler for startups and businesses. Luisa Marchina, marketing and corporate communications manager at LuxProvide tells us more about MeluXina’s journey and how startups can harness its immense computing power.
MeluXina has been operational since June 2021. What milestones has it achieved since then?
Over the last year and a half, a lot of optimisations and improvements were made to MeluXina, and a team of experts was put together – half of which is active in the technical domain and half is more business-oriented.
We also opened an early access programme that allowed businesses across Luxembourg to start interacting with us and MeluXina’s computing power. This was a great success and helped us connect with the ecosystem. In November 2022, our new CEO, David Papiah, came on board. As the former Fujitsu Systems Europe CEO, he brings a lot of knowledge about the industry
Then in 2023, we really started being more open in our communications and in our attempts to convey our new strategy. This involves really communicating that MeluXina is not just for big companies and that it is accessible to everyone, including startups.
Lastly, we have been showing that LuxProvide is more than just an HPC centre and that we offer a wide range of services related to MeluXina. These are offered by our in-house experts and include services such as the co-creation of new solutions to support businesses in their digital transformation and extract tangible value from their data.
What other services do you provide?
We offer end-to-end services. We start with design thinking processes jointly with our customers and deliver solutions encapsulating the full spectrum of data management up to the level of providing information for business decisions. We move along based on the challenge the business is facing, whether that is reducing costs, improving a process or growing your business with digital solutions. For some solutions we use off-the-shelf products we have already developed, for others, we work together with the customers to create bespoke solutions.
“Compared to other supercomputers across Europe […] MeluXina was set up in order to help businesses take advantage of new technologies and boost their digital transformation.”
Luisa Marchina, marketing and corporate communications manager at LuxProvide
How have you supported startups in their development?
RSS-Hydro is one of the startups that joined us during our early access stage and now they have a year-long open contract with us. They came to us with a model they had developed to assess flooding risks and realised that it was running 10 times faster on MeluXina and on top of that gave them results with greater accuracy and tested for more scenarios. This in turn saved them a lot of time and helped them go to market faster.
We also recently started working with Zortify and are supporting them in the development of their natural language processing models. Last but not least, WEO Water has also used our services for which we were awarded the ICT Business Partner of the Year award.
What options exist for startups to use MeluXina’s services?
We are currently working very closely with the LCI and the House of Startups to facilitate this. However, we cannot disclose any details just yet. Furthermore, there are European and national subsidies that can be accessed by companies.
We usually direct companies to Supercomputing Luxembourg, an initiative set up by the European Union, which acts as an entry point for businesses to make use of MeluXina. They are also the best point of contact to learn more about available subsidies.
What other information do you wish more companies understood about MeluXina?
Many companies think they need a fully developed idea or project to work with us – this is not the case. A lot of them are also not aware that we offer a pay-as-you-go option which allows companies to access MeluXina whenever they want or when the need arises.
Another aspect we really want more companies to be aware of is that we are ISO 27001 certified, which establishes us as a trusted partner for data management and storage and are committed to ensuring that the security of your data is continuously improved. On top of that, your data will be stored in Luxembourg, which from a data sovereignty standpoint is a key differentiator compared to other players.
In what sense is MeluXina a cornerstone of the digital economy in Luxembourg?
Compared to other supercomputers across Europe, which focus a lot on research and academia, MeluXina was set up in order to help businesses take advantage of new technologies and boost their digital transformation. That is why our CEO often says: “We are the backbone of the digital transformation in Luxembourg.”
Without us, there is no access to this really valuable, powerful and unique infrastructure which can act as a springboard for companies’ development. That is also why we are working so hard on cooperating with the main stakeholders of the ecosystem and offering our expertise to co-develop solutions that businesses need.
This article was first published in the Silicon Luxembourg magazine. Get your copy.
