SLICES-BE: The Belgian Node of SLICES

SLICES-BE is the Belgian component of the SLICES (Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies) pan-European research infrastructure. It currently comprises four prominent academic institutions:

• Ghent University
• University of Antwerp
• Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain)
• University of Liège
  
  

Overall coordination of the Belgian node is managed by imec, a world-renowned research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies.

SLICES-BE is listed on the International Research Infrastructures (IRI) Roadmap, recognizing its strategic importance to the Flemish Region and Community. Since 2023, FWO (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Research Foundation Flanders) has provided financial support to SLICES-BE. Financial support is also provided through the Walloon regional government.  

SLICES-BE enables cutting-edge experimentation across several domains covering wired and wireless networking, (federated) machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and edge computing, distributed software systems, service backends and scalability,… It supports research and development for academic groups, industrial partners and SMEs within Belgium but also on a European level as well as internationally through a well-established network of interconnections with other research facilities.

The SLICES-BE resources include over 550 bare-metal servers, more than 200 wireless nodes, Software-defined radios (SDRs) and a GPU-rich infrastructure with over 125 high-performance GPUs for supporting AI and GPU-accelerated workloads.