Connecting ELIXIR, HPC and AI Factories at PMNET Forum 2026

On 9 October 2026, the fifth PMNET Forum at the National Library of Latvia hosted the session “Big Health & Omics Data at Scale: ELIXIR, HPC and AI Factories”. Chaired by Dr. rer. nat. Baiba Vilne of Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU), it focused on how European high-performance computing (HPC), trusted research environments and AI infrastructure can support research using large-scale and sensitive health and omics data.

Juha Törnroos (CSC, ELIXIR Compute Platform) presented the Finnish and European perspective on federated cloud and HPC services for life sciences. His contribution covered the evolution of European genomic and phenotypic data infrastructure, secure processing approaches, the role of GA4GH standards and ELIXIR’s links to the European AI Factories initiative.

Aadi Tegova and Arnold Leonhard Mertsin, from the University of Tartu HPC Centre, outlined Estonia’s research-computing ecosystem. A central example was SAPU, a Sensitive Data Analysis Platform implemented as a Trusted Research Environment (TRE). Their talk also connected Estonia’s computing infrastructure to genomics initiatives and the LUMI supercomputer and AI Factory.

Presenting developments in Latvia, Vita Zeidenberga, Director of the University of Latvia’s AI and Computing Centre, described ongoing efforts to expand national research-computing capabilities. She highlighted the “AI Factory Antenna – Latvia” project and its connection with Finland’s LUMI AI Factory.

The session concluded with a panel discussion on practical access to infrastructure for life-science researchers, secure use of sensitive data, combining the protections of TREs with GPU-intensive computing, and opportunities for closer Baltic–Nordic cooperation.

For the emerging ELIXIR Latvia Node, the discussion underscored that successful research infrastructure depends not only on computing capacity, but also on interoperable, secure services that researchers can use in practice. The session formed part of RSU Participation in the Horizon Europe Programme (Project No. 1.1.1.5/3/25/I/014), supporting Latvia’s integration into ELIXIR.