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.