Winners of the eScience Center-Lorentz Competition 2025 Announced 

Last August, the Lorentz Center and the Netherlands eScience Center invited researchers to apply for the eScience Center-Lorentz Competition 2025. The call sought ambitious proposals to tackle the infrastructure bottlenecks currently constraining the global AI transformation in science. 

We are thrilled to announce the winning workshop that will help shape the future of Dutch and European research IT: 

Beyond Models: Distributed AI Infrastructure as a Scientific Instrument 

The Organizing Team: 

  • Azza Ahmed, TU Delft, lead organiser, HPC and AI infrastructure 
  • Thomas Abeel, TU Delft, research software and reproducibility 
  • Raymond Oonk, SURF, national infrastructure coordination 
  • Andrew Jones, Microsoft, international HPC perspective  
  • Arnaud Renard, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, MesoNET federation 

A Roadmap for Federated AI 

A key enabler of AI is infrastructure that is secure, accessible, scalable, and state-of-the-art. In the Netherlands, such compute capacity remains limited and fragmented despite major initiatives, and power constraints often limit the expansion of local hardware. This workshop addresses a critical question: How can we share, compute, data, and expertise across institutions safely and effectively? By connecting domain scientists, infrastructure providers, and research software engineers, the organizers aim to move “Beyond Models” to treat distributed AI infrastructure as a unified scientific instrument. The workshop will bring together a diverse cohort of experts—ranging from CERN and Nikhef to Health-RI and Flower Labs—to explore extreme-scale workloads and AI on regulated, sensitive data. 

“By bringing together key players in AI and research infrastructure, this workshop will shape the future of federated AI research in the Netherlands. With participation from SURF, EuroHPC, Microsoft HPC, and CERN, it aims to define how distributed AI workflows will run across the national and European infrastructure ecosystem over the next decade,” says Pablo Lopez-Tarifa, Section Head for Life Sciences, Netherlands eScience Center. 

Workshop with Support 

As winners of the competition, the organizers will host an intensive, five-day Lorentz Center workshop (lambda location) with a budget of €15,000 for travel, hotel, and catering. Furthermore, the project will receive 460 hours of dedicated support from Research Software Engineers (RSEs) from the Netherlands eScience Center to facilitate the development of a practitioner-oriented decision framework and a “technician’s guide” for federated AI. 

We look forward to co-hosting this vital and timely workshop next year at the Lorentz Center. The Lorentz Center and the Netherlands eScience Center thank all applicants for their high-quality submissions. 

For more information about the eScience Center – Lorentz Competition, and to stay informed about future opportunities, please visit the webpage.