March 11 — Since 2012 PRACE has been proposing to European companies an industrial Open R&D offer, based on a unique set of complementary high-level services spanning from information and networking, training, access to leading HPC resources and expertise, to code enabling of open-source applications. Now this documented project offer has been remarked and awarded as an effort in catalysing European industrial competitiveness.

The FP7 Success Story Competition highlights the three best success stories from the FP7 Capacities funding programme in e-Infrastructures. Project success stories in Competitive industry category show how the project made Europe a more attractive location to invest in research and innovation, by promoting activities where businesses set the agenda. It will help innovative SMEs to grow into world-leading companies. PRACE's proposal paper "How e-research infrastructures can catalyse European industrial Competitiveness" was selected as the winner of the Competitive industry category. The paper describes PRACE's continuous commitment to develop services for industry to benefit from PRACE research infrastructure.

Since the establishment of the PRACE Open R&D industrial offer in January 2012, PRACE has been able to attract more than 10 European companies; large companies as well as SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) for using its HPC facilities as well as the others high-value services.

"This award in 'Competitive industries' will foster our motivation to work on engaging industrial users on the PRACE research infrastructure in order to boost European competitiveness," says Stephane Requena, author of the project paper and member of the Board of Directors of PRACE.

"PRACE is working on increasing the use of a leading European infrastructure by all academic and industrial communities and is catalysing technological transfer between academia and industry through Open Innovation projects," says Requena. "In that sense we are working in the field of the FP7 funded PRACE-3IP implementation project on a tailored evangelisation programme called SHAPE (SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe) which aims to help SMEs to co-design and demonstrate a concrete industrial project on PRACE facilities."

"The goal of SHAPE is really to allow SMEs to assess the potential and the ROI (Return on Investment) of using HPC for being more competitive and creating new value. Such assessment will be performed by SMEs by co-developing a concrete industrial project with experts and demonstrating it using PRACE HPC resources. After this demonstration companies will have a clear view about the potential of HPC, the investments to perform, the skills to hire, the software or methodologies to develop, and they could either continue to use PRACE services for Open R&D services or to take advantage of commercial activities by buying their own HPC facilities or access remote HPC services on commercial Cloud platforms," explains Dr. Giovanni Erbacci, from CINECA, co-author of the project paper and leader of the "Services for Industrial Users & SMEs" activity in PRACE-3IP project.

About PRACE

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are provided by 4 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, GCS representing Germany and GENCI representing France). The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements RI-261557, RI-283493 and RI-312763.

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Source: PRACE