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The European Innovation Council offers business up to EUR 30 million for companies to develop industrial technologies – accelerate them using supercomputers

Innovative companies and ambitious start-ups have a unique opportunity to receive significant support for technological development in 2025. The European Innovation Council (EIC) has launched a new EUR 300 million Step-up Facility to support the development of digital and engineering innovation, sustainable technologies, and biotechnologies.

Selected projects can receive funding of up to EUR 30 million, opening the door to significant technology developments for companies. Plus, we will help you design how to accelerate your projects with the power of supercomputers.

What areas does the initiative target?

  • Digital and Engineering Technologies, specifically semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, sensors, robotics, and autonomous systems.
  • Sustainable technologies focusing on net-zero solutions such as solar and wind energy, battery storage, geothermal energy, hydrogen, biogas, carbon capture, as well as circular economy and nuclear energy.
  • Biotechnology, including critical drug discovery, DNA/RNA, proteins, cell engineering, gene vectors, bioinformatics, and nanobiotechnology.

How to participate?

Applications are now open, and interested parties can submit their projects via the EIC website. The evaluation of the submitted projects takes place on a quarterly basis. Detailed information on the programme and funding conditions can be found here.

We can help you accelerate your plan with supercomputers

Solving such global challenges generally requires the employment of advanced data analysis, simulation, modelling, artificial intelligence, and, therefore, supercomputers or the aforementioned quantum technologies. In these areas, we will be happy to guide you and help you create tailored solutions.

Turn your innovative ideas into successful solutions and join the technological leaders in Europe.

All you need to do is contact us and get free support from experts in supercomputing and quantum computing in practice.

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What skills do supercomputer users want to improve? From the basics of quantum computing to advanced AI

Our team prepares dozens of training courses per year for those interested in learning about high-performance computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. We offer courses and workshops ranging from beginner level to deeply specialised topics for the advanced.

However, user needs are changing dynamically. Therefore, we identify current needs through a Training Needs Survey when preparing new training programmes.

Read more about the latest survey results in the detailed analysis.

Survey results in a nutshell:

Training needs:

  • The most popular are HPC courses at all levels. 60% of respondents said it was very interesting.
    • Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the second most popular topic. 36 % of respondents said it was very interesting.
    • Quantum computing is on the rise, but most respondents have minimal experience in this area.
  • Training formats and delivery methods:
    • The most preferred format was a combination of theoretical lectures and practical exercises.
    • Online training has become the most convenient form.  Preferences for face-to-face training are declining.
    • The most requested are one-day or shorter training courses.
  • The greatest interest was in the following specific course topics:
    • Access to HPC resources.
    • Parallel programming (MPI, OpenMP).
    • GPU-accelerated computing.
    • Neural Network Architectures for AI.
    • Introduction to Gate-Based Quantum Computing.

A total of 105 respondents, mainly from academia, industry, and the public sector, participated in the survey. Those interested in training tend to come from domains such as computer science, applied mathematics, and materials science.

If you would like further information on the Training Needs Survey analysis or have any other questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at training@it4i.cz.

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We have connected the world of business and supercomputing – InnoVerse 2024

The InnoVerse 2024 conference has become a key event supporting entrepreneurship, innovation, science, and technology not only in the Moravian-Silesian Region. We are proud to be the main partner of this inspiring event, which welcomed more than 500 participants to the auditorium of VSB—Technical University of Ostrava on 28 November 2024.

Through a hands-on workshop, pitch-deck session, and supercomputing booth, we showed participants that supercomputing is not science fiction but an effective tool for innovation.

However, the greatest success of this event lies in establishing contacts with several companies interested in learning more about the possibilities of adopting supercomputing in their practice.

This event represents a further step towards the broader deployment of high-performance computing in industry and research. We thank the organisers from the Moravian-Silesian Innovation Centre (MSIC) for this exceptional conference and look forward to the next edition.

Soak up the atmosphere of this year’s InnoVerse from the photo gallery below.

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Six Czech companies compete for a EUR 300,000 supercomputing grant in the European FFplus call

Six Czech companies have entered the competition to receive a grant of up to EUR 300,000 to use supercomputers to solve their business challenges. They can implement their projects using the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, including Ostrava’s Karolina. The evaluation of the submitted projects is currently underway. Those selected by the committee will be implemented from January 2025.

The European FFplus call offers two unique opportunities for SMEs and start-ups. The first one, called Business Experiments, is for enterprises with no previous experience with supercomputing that decide to use supercomputers to solve their specific practical problems. A total of 4 Czech companies have applied for the first round of this part of the call and are also the principal investigators of the submitted projects.

The second part of the FFplus call, called Innovations studies, is for enterprises and start-ups that want to use supercomputers to develop and advance applications and projects in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. Two Czech companies that are part of internationally submitted projects and act as partners have applied for this call.

“The involvement of Czech companies in the first phase of the FFplus call is a successful outcome. I believe that there will be even more interest in the next rounds. Businesses in the Czech Republic are continuously interested in using supercomputers in practice,” said Tomáš Karásek, Head of the National Competence Centre in HPC (NCC).

A two-phase evaluation by more than 60 experts and ten moderators is currently underway. Each project is evaluated by two independent evaluators who are mentored by a moderator. “We expect that the list of successful projects that will receive grant funding will be published by the end of this year,” said Kateřina Beranová, Communications Specialist at the NCC.

By 2028, the FFplus project will have distributed a total of EUR 8 million among companies. The next round of the call will open to companies in the early summer of 2025. The NCC assists companies with the project preparation and application process. If they use the computational resources of the Ostrava supercomputers, they will cooperate with experts from IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center to implement the project.

For more information about the FFplus project, see the NCC website.

The current FFplus call is the fourth phase of a continuous project that has been running since 2013. Its main objective is to help enterprises overcome the barriers associated with using supercomputers 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.

Media Contact

Kateřina Beranová, Communication Specialist at National Competence Centre in HPC

katerina.beranova@vsb.cz

tel.: +420 770 641 223

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Konference uživatelů IT4Innovations - přístupy k superpočítačům EuroHPC JU

At the Users’ Conference of IT4I, we presented ways to access the most powerful supercomputers in Europe

At the beginning of November, IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center held a conference for its current and future supercomputing users. During the programme, we introduced the participants to Europe’s most powerful supercomputer network and how to access it. This network also includes the Karolina supercomputer in Ostrava, operated by IT4Innovations.

Interested participants thus received the most up-to-date information on computing systems and planned innovations presented by the pan-European EuroHPC Joint Undertaking at the user conference held in Amsterdam in October.

However, we mainly presented key details about the five types of EuroHPC JU calls through which it is possible to apply for computational resources of European supercomputers. We also provided an overview of the evaluation process concerning the submitted project applications and the closure dates of each call.

View our full presentation

The Users’ Conference of IT4Innovations attracted almost 80 participants, who took part in 22 expert lectures and subsequent discussions. Major topics included advances in machine learning, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, and materials engineering. These talks demonstrated the practical results and benefits that the use of supercomputers brings across a variety of scientific domains. For more information, visit the IT4Innovations website.

 

5 types of calls for companies, researchers, and public institutions to obtain computational resources

The EuroHPC JU grant competitions are divided into five categories according to the purpose of use and the required amount of computational resources of supercomputers. The following calls are currently available:

  • Benchmark Access — It allows application developers and researchers to test and benchmark their applications. Users receive a limited number of node hours prior to applying for other calls.
  • Development Access — This is designated for application developers and researchers who require a small number of node hours to develop, test, and optimise their applications.
  • AI and Data-Intensive Applications Access — It is open mainly to small and medium-sized enterprises, startups, and public sector entities, who require access to supercomputing resources to perform artificial intelligence (AI) and data-intensive tasks.
  • Regular Access — It is designated for users from private and public sectors whose projects require large-scale resources or frequent access to significant computational resources and data repositories.
  • Extreme-Scale Access — It is designated for high-impact and high societal gain innovative research applications requiring large amount of computational resources, data repositories, and support.

 

For more about the EuroHPC JU calls, see here.

Read also about funding opportunities for supercomputing projects.

 

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