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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.