LifeWatchGreece: Construction and operation of the National Research Infrastructure (ESFRI)

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are considered to be tools for science and operate in the form of facilities, resources and services. They promote technological development and provide an accelerator for the advancement of knowledge by offering unique research services to all interested users and stakeholders to enable top-level research in all possible scientific disciplines: from social sciences to astronomy and from genomics to nanotechnologies. High level research often cannot be carried out with only the existing facilities of any institute and frequently depends on large scale RI on national or international scale. Examples of such RIs may include large-scale facilities such as collections, special habitats, libraries, databases, biological archives, clean rooms, mesocosm tanks, integrated arrays of small research installations, high-capacity/highspeed communication networks, high performance computing clusters (HPC, supercomputers), data infrastructure, laboratories, research vessels, satellite and aircraft observation facilities, coastal observatories, telescopes, synchrotrons and accelerators (Commission Staff Working Document 2013). The RIs may be: (a) “single-sited”, which are installed at a single location and based on a single resource, (b) “distributed”, which are ‡ ‡ ‡ ‡