Nov. 20 — The PRACE SHAPE Pilot to stimulate SMEs to use HPC for industrial innovation and competitiveness selected 10 SME applicants to participate. These 10 small European companies will receive intensive support to incorporate HPC into their business models.

SHAPE (SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe) is a new pan-European programme supported by PRACE. The Programme aims to raise awareness and provide European SMEs with the expertise necessary to take advantage of the innovation possibilities created by HPC, thus increasing their competitiveness. The programme will deploy progressively a set of complementary services towards SMEs such as information, training, access to expertise (domain science as well as applied mathematics and HPC) for co-developing a concrete industrial project to be demonstrated using PRACE HPC resources.

To better define and prove the viability and value of the SHAPE Programme, a SHAPE Pilot was launched to refine the details of the initiative and prepare its launch in a fully operational form. The pilot worked with a few selected SMEs and introduced HPC-based tools and techniques into their business, operational, or production environment. The mission is to help the selected SMEs to demonstrate a tangible Return on Investment (RoI) by assessing and adopting solutions supported by HPC, thus facilitating innovation and/or increased operational efficiency in their businesses.

The pilot started in June 2013 with an open Call for Applications to all European SMEs that have a business project that can be implemented using HPC. The call had a brilliant response, involving 14 SMEs, from 7 different Countries (Bulgaria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK) and spanning across various industrial domains. Now that the review process is completed, the PRACE SHAPE experts will work with the 10 selected SMEs until May 2014, when the Pilot will be completed, to develop their solutions, providing them with knowledge that will allow them to make an informed decision on the selected HPC solutions and plan future actions, also considering the support of independent service providers at a later stage.

The results of the pilot will allow PRACE to refine the SHAPE programme, and be in a position to change the attitude of European SMEs towards HPC, foster technological transfer between academia and industry and ultimately increase European competiveness.

“These first 10 selected applications developed by SMEs give an excellent impression of what industrial players both large and small are capable of when given access to the right tools, in this case PRACE’s world-class HPC resources and services. We will be attentively following the outcomes of these selected projects which will clearly demonstrate how PRACE can foster co-operation between science and industry to strengthen European industrial competitiveness,” said Dr. Jürgen Kohler, Chair of the PRACE Industrial Advisory Committee.

The following 10 applications were selected for the SHAPE Pilot:

THESAN S.p.A, Italy > Improvement of hydraulic turbine design through HPC
Thesan is an Italian SME involved in energy sustainability. The project aims to optimise the design of a volumetric machine (hydraulic turbine) currently being developed by Thesan, improving the overall performance by designing and realising rotating chambers where the fluid flows, drastically cutting down the time and resources needed to construct a physical prototype and actually building the preferred structure only.

Albatern Ltd, UK > Numerical Simulation of Extremely Large Interconnected WaveNET Arrays
Albatern develops novel interconnected offshore marine renewable energy devices. The goal of the project is to develop and deploy a code to simulate a large scale WaveNET array using HPC parallel technology. The results of the simulations will contribute by mitigating risk and reduce overall development time and cost.

NSilico Life Science Ltd, Ireland > High Performance Computation for Short Read Alignment
NSilico is a company based in Ireland, developing integrated molecular diagnostics and analytic tools for the life sciences and healthcare industries. The project aims at identify accurate data analytic applications for ribosomal RNA sequence analysis taking advantage of massively parallel architectures. This would not only provide a technical advantage but would also provide the developed solution with greater access to commercial markets.

Audionamix, France > Unmix Up
Audionamix is a French company developing innovative audio unmixing technologies, relying on computationally intensive optimization algorithms.The project will help Audionamix to explore the latest hardware and software solutions. The unmixing algorithms will be adapted to enable multi-GPU-based hardware configurations. The improvements in technology speed are expected to unveil new business opportunities in processing large audio material bases, accelerating R&D inside the company.

Juan Yacht Design, SL, (JYD), Spain > Testing LES turbulence models in race boat sail
Juan Yatch Design SL is a Spanish company specialized in the design of sail boats. The project aims at testing new methods for the design of racing boat sails using novel HPC simulation techniques, introducing competitive advantages that will allow JYD to become a world class leader in this segment.

OPTIMA pharma GmbH, Germany > Enhanced airflow simulations around filling machines in clean rooms
Optima pharma offers an immensely diversified and innovative range of filling and packing machines for pharmaceutical products, e.g. sterile liquids and powders, and will profit from airflow simulations in clean rooms which minimize trial and error cycles during innovative machine design and reduce expensive hardware tests.

AMET s.r.l., Italy > Robustness in safety performances analysis
AMET is an Italian high-tech engineering company, active in the design and development of mechanic and mechatronic products and processes. The project aims to analyze state of the art simulation techniques to replace the standard deterministic approach, used to evaluate the passive safety performances of a vehicle, with a robust lean statistical approach.

ENTARES Engineering, France > CAPITOL-HPC+
ENTARES Engineering is a French SME developing electromagnetism simulation software to study the electromagnetic behavior of products during the design, before the manufacturing phase. This project aims to validate a quick and easy parallel simulation tool that can be operated at an early stage of system design, with a controlled level of accuracy. In addition, a commercial offer for this software environment, such as pay-per-use scheme, developing a partnership with a computing center to propose a service, will be investigated.

Lapcos Scrl, Italy > Virtual Test Bench for Centrifugal Pump
Lapcos is an engineering firm which adopts virtual prototyping technologies. The proposed project is aimed at building, upon the OpenFOAM library for CFD, a custom, vertical product for automatically design centrifugal pumps, exploiting HPC resources.

MONOTRICAT S.r.l., Italy > CFD simulation of an innovative hull
Monotricat SRL is an Italian company that designs an innovative hull, characterized by hydrodynamic efficiency; the aim of the proposed project is to use CFD on HPC methodologies applied to its hull in order to optimize their R&D work flow.

For information on the SHAPE pilot, please visit the SHAPE website at www.prace-ri.eu/shape or contactshape[at]prace-ri.eu.

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. For more information, see www.prace-ri.eu

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Source: PRACE