FFplus' First Tranche of Business Experiments and Innnovation Studies Get Underway

The FFplus project continues the Fortissimo Mission, supporting European SMEs and Startups on their path toward innovation and business growth. It provides a cascade funding system through six open calls, with a total budget of EUR 24.5 million.

Through the first Open Call, 37 sub-projects will be granted funding—18 Innovation Studies and 19 Business Experiments.

Last week, a three-day online Kick-off Meeting was held, where all sub-project partners presented their targets and development plans. The work on these innovative projects has already begun. Innovation Studies have a duration of up to 10 months, while Business Experiments can last up to 15 months.

FFplus core partners provided key information about the project in order to explain the overall context for the sub-projects.  Dr. Cosima-Maria Weyers from HLRS opened the event with a comprehensive overview of the European HPC ecosystem, focusing on EUROHPC JU activities and HPC infrastructure. She also highlighted the importance of supporting actors such as National Competence Centers, which operate under the EUROCC2 initiative.

On the final day, Claudio Arlandini from CINECA presented MINERVA, a central hub for cutting-edge European competencies in large-scale ML/AI research and development. Meanwhile, Laura Bellentani from CINECA introduced the EPICURE project, which facilitates knowledge exchange through hardware-specific training, hackathons, webinars, and workshops across several EU countries.

Dr. Guy Lonsdale, CEO of scapos and Open Call Lead, commented on the goals of the calls:

“With the FFplus project, we are both continuing the evolution of the previous Fortissimo projects and introducing a new type of activity (hence the “plus” in the project name). The completely new aspect of FFplus is the generative AI technology development actions. The classical Fortissimo approach is to demonstrate the impact of using HPC to address business challenges, aiming to improve the efficiency of business processes from product design to operational procedures. Over the last decade, we have seen an evolution beyond numerical methods to include data analytics, machine learning, and AI. Our overarching goal is to reach out to the entire EU SME ecosystem to inspire them to leverage HPC for their own business challenges.”

SMEs and Startups now have the opportunity to unlock their innovation potential through the execution of sub-projects in two main application areas:

• Business Experiments will focus on helping SMEs adopt HPC to solve specific business challenges, specifically for those with no prior experience using HPC services.

• Innovation Studies will support European SMEs and Startups already active in generative AI, providing the computational resources they need to scale.

Detailed information about the sub-projects will be publicly available soon.