July 2024 - EuroCC Czechia

Press Release: Companies will receive EUR 8 million to solve challenges with supercomputers

23 July 2024

The European FFplus initiative is looking for innovative companies and start-ups. It will distribute EUR 8 million to selected companies that decide to use a supercomputer to address their needs. The initiative is aimed at businesses with no previous experience in supercomputing or those active in the artificial intelligence (AI) field. The companies will receive not only financial support but also access to supercomputing infrastructure and expert advice from HPC experts.

All you need is a vision and interest, and experts will help with the rest. The call is open to SMEs and startups based in the Czech Republic or the European Union.

“This is an exceptional opportunity for companies to receive financial support to implement the project they have submitted, and it is open to all European companies. The National Competence Centre in High-Performance Computing can help Czech companies with the submission of a project proposal as well as with its implementation. Companies just need to show their interest, and we will be happy to help them with the rest. At the same time, we can refer companies based in another European country to the relevant foreign centre,” said Tomáš Karásek, Head of the National Competence Centre in HPC (NCC).

NCC experts will guide companies through the process of creating a suitable project. They have been working with small and medium-sized enterprises to solve their specific projects using supercomputers for several years. “The companies we work with usually have no experience with supercomputers. That is exactly what we are here for. We combine the companies’ deep industry knowledge with the expertise of the supercomputing experts at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center. By combining science and practice, innovative solutions that can give companies a major competitive advantage in the marketplace are created,” explained Mr. Karásek.

The FFplus call is divided into two parts. The first, called “Business Experiments”, is aimed at businesses with no previous experience in supercomputing that decide to use these technologies. The selected projects will start on 1 December 2024 and should be completed within ten months. The second part, Innovation studies, will support companies and startups working in generative AI and large language models lacking the necessary computational and financial resources. Projects in this part will start on 1 January 2025 with a maximum duration of 15 months.

Companies can submit their projects until 4 September 2024.

Supercomputers have a wide range of practical applications across all domains. Companies use them, for example, to develop and innovate products, create digital twins and perform advanced simulations, optimise processes, estimate manufacturing defects, manage inventory, automatically detect objects, analyse large volumes of data, and create photorealistic visualisations.

The newly launched FFplus initiative is the fourth phase of a continuous project that has been running since 2013. Its main objective is to help businesses overcome the barriers associated with using supercomputing in practice and thus strengthen the global competitiveness of the European industry. Over the years, nearly 200 companies from across Europe have implemented projects to harness the computing power of supercomputers in practice. By 2028, the initiative will have launched six calls of this type.

For more information on completed projects, please visit www.ffplus-project.eu.

For more information about the initiative, see the NCK website.

Media Contact

Kateřina Beranová, Senior Marketing Specialist for National Competence Centre in HPC

katerina.beranova(@)vsb.cz

tel.: +420 770 641 223

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EUR 8 million for companies interested in solving their challenges with supercomputers

The FFplus project has launched a new open call for small and medium-sized European enterprises. The call is aimed at agile, innovative companies that decide to use supercomputers in practice and gain a competitive advantage in the market.

Strengthening innovation and development of European industry

The FFplus project is the fourth edition of a highly successful initiative that directly addresses how to help businesses overcome the barriers to using supercomputing and high-performance data analytics in practice or working with and developing generative AI. In particular, the aim is to strengthen the global competitiveness of European industry.

In recent years, dozens of companies from all over Europe have successfully passed the open calls for using supercomputers. Be inspired by their stories published on the FFplus website.

The FFplus call is divided into two parts:

1. BUSINESS EXPERIMENTS

The first part of the call is aimed at enterprises with no previous supercomputing experience across all sectors. In this call, enterprises can submit their “experiments”, i.e. projects that solve a specific business challenge using supercomputing technologies, high-performance data analytics, and artificial intelligence. Experiments are expected to last a maximum of 15 months, with a scheduled commencement date of 1 January 2025.

Experiment duration expected: max. 15 months.

Planned start date: 1 January 2025.

An amount of EUR 4 million for funding experiments will be distributed among all selected individual projects. There is a limit of EUR 200,000 per experiment application.

The deadline for applications is 4 September 2024 at 5:00 p.m.

2. INNOVATION STUDIES

The second part of the FFplus call will support companies and startups that are already active in generative AI but lack the necessary computational resources to develop their own models. The aim is to facilitate and strengthen the technological development of European companies in AI.

Participating companies will be supported in increasing their innovation potential by leveraging new generative AI models, such as large language models (LLMs), based on their expertise, application domain, business model, and potential for expansion.

Submitted “innovation studies / use cases” must use extensive European supercomputing resources (pre-exascale and exascale) to develop and adapt generative AI models (e.g. LLM).

Experiment duration expected: max. 10 months.

Planned start date: 1 December 2024.

An amount of EUR 4 million for funding experiments will be distributed among all selected individual projects. There is a limit of EUR 300,000 per study application.

The deadline for applications is 4 September 2024 at 5:00 p.m.

Are you interested in this opportunity? Find out more on the FFplus website.

Contact us, and experts at the National Competence Centre in HPC will gladly assist with the experiment’s setup and submission.