FORTISSIMO 2 Call for Proposals: HPC-Cloud-based Application Experiments

fortissimoToday, the Fortissimo 2 consortium of 38 partners has announced the launch of its first Open Call for Proposals. The project 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 the simulation of coupled physical processes or high-performance data analytics. Additional application experiments are sought to complement and to extend current project activities; these new experiments must be driven by the business needs of engineering and manufacturing SMEs and mid-caps.

The Fortissimo 2 project is funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Framework Program for Research and Innovation and is a follow-on action to the Fortissimo project established in 2013. As its predecessor, Fortissimo 2 is a collaborative project that will enable European SMEs to be more competitive globally through the use of simulation services running on a High Performance Computing cloud infrastructure. The project is coordinated by the University of Edinburgh and involves manufacturing companies, application developers, domain experts, IT solution providers, HPC cloud service providers and HPC centers.

Fortissimo 2 will drive the uptake of advanced modeling, simulation and data analytics by European engineering and manufacturing SMEs and mid-caps. Such an uptake will deliver improved design processes, better products and services, and improved competitiveness. For the European Union as a whole, this means improved employment opportunities and economic growth.

The importance of advanced ICT to the competitiveness of both large and small companies in the engineering and manufacturing domain is well established. Despite early successes in this area, there are still many barriers to the uptake of such solutions, not least of which are the initial cost and complexity of adoption, particularly in the context of challenging trading conditions.

At the core of Fortissimo 2 are three tranches of application experiments. These experiments will be driven by the requirements of first-time users (predominately SMEs) and will bring together actors from across the value chain, from cycle providers to domain experts via the Fortissimo 2 experiments. This will enable innovative solutions to manufacturing challenges, leading to new and improved design processes, products and services. A key feature of Fortissimo 2 will be the adaption of the Fortissimo Marketplace based on feedback from the application experiments. An initial tranche of Fortissimo 2 experiments started on February 1st, 2016 with two further tranches resulting from the competitive calls for proposals in 2016.

Proposals are due May 18, 2016.

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