Fortissimo 2 Consortium Launches Second Open Call for Proposals

Sept. 28 — The Fortissimo 2 consortium announced the launch of its Second Open Call for proposals.

The Fortissimo 2 project (Horizon 2020 contract 6804811) is funding a set of experiments (sub-projects) to extend and demonstrate the business potential of an ecosystem for HPC-Cloud services, specifically for applications involving simulation of coupled physical processes or high-performance data analytics. Additional application experiments are sought to complement and to extend current project activities. These application experiments should be driven by requirements from the end-users (SMEs or mid-caps who are first-time HPC users) and bring together all actors in the value chain, from cycle providers to domain experts, leading to new and improved design processes, products or services.

At the core of Fortissimo are applications experiments. Fortissimo 2 extends the set of 53 experiments from the initial Fortissimo project with three new tranches of experiments: a set of 14 initial application experiments which started together with the project, a set of 10 experiments (starting on the 1st of November, 2016) which were selected through the First Open Call for Proposals and a further set of experiments to be selected through this Open Call. A total of 73 proposals were submitted to the First Open Call, showing the huge interest of SMEs and mid-caps in improving their designs and processes with advanced ICT methods on HPC systems in the Cloud.

About Fortissimo 2

The core objective of Fortissimo is to promote the uptake of advanced modelling, simulation and data-analytics technologies by European SMEs in the manufacturing sector. Using application experiments derived from actual business scenarios those technologies can be adopted by SMEs and mid-caps and then potentially be integrated into and offered as services in the Fortissimo Marketplace. The development of the Fortissimo Marketplace started during the original Fortissimo project; its function as a “one-stop pay-per-use shop” will be extended in Fortissimo 2, in particular in response to the needs of the services and technologies developed within the experiments of Fortissimo 2.

The project, with a running time of three years, is coordinated by the University of Edinburgh and involves 38 partners, including manufacturing companies, application developers, domain experts, IT solution providers, HPC cloud service providers and HPC centres.

Using the Fortissimo HPC Cloud and Marketplace, SMEs and mid-caps have the possibility to profit from the know-how of HPC and software experts and to get easy access to hardware and software tools. Through the easy use of advanced ICT, European SMEs and mid-caps will be more competitive and able to offer improved designs and better products or services – leading to improved employment opportunities and economic growth in the European Union.

Expectations for the new experiments

The new application experiments should provide business-relevant investigations and demonstrations of high-performance data analytics or of modelling and simulation of coupled phenomena in the Fortissimo HPC Cloud that deliver business benefits for manufacturing and engineering SMEs and mid-caps. Priority will be given to proposals for experiments which:

a. are driven by the requirements of first-time HPC users and, by implication, organisations engaging in Fortissimo for the first time;

b. complement the activities already included within Fortissimo and Fortissimo 2.

In this context, complementarity is understood to mean activities that address new applications, business cases, industrial sectors and market segments and which facilitate an enhanced demonstration of the impact of the Fortissimo approach for a broad set of industrial users.

Fortissimo 2 experiments should also consider how they can develop services, deployed in the Fortissimo marketplace, which can subsequently be used by other end-users.

Proposed experiments should include all the necessary participants, which may include HPC and Big Data experts, HPC Centres or ISVs either already included within or external to the Fortissimo 2 consortium. Experiments will employ the Fortissimo HPC infrastructure using the HPC Centres already involved in the project.

Call Details