EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has announced an upcoming online event, the EuroHPC Access Calls Webinar – Evaluation Process, Technical Assessment and Best Practices, scheduled for 13 May 2026 from 10:00 to 12:30 (CEST).
The webinar is aimed at researchers and users from both the public and private sectors who are interested in applying for access to EuroHPC supercomputing resources. It will cover key topics such as proposal preparation, evaluation procedures, benchmarking, and successful project implementation. Sessions will be delivered by experts from leading European HPC organizations, offering practical guidance and insights based on real application experiences.
Representatives of NCC Montenegro are actively contributing to the development of the National AI Strategy of Montenegro 2026–2030 as members of the national Working Group coordinated by the Ministry of Public Administration of Montenegro, with support from UNDP Montenegro. The overarching goal of the Strategy is to enable Montenegro to respond to global AI challenges while leveraging its potential for smart, sustainable, and inclusive development, in alignment with European and international standards.
Ministry of Public Administration, regional expert, and UNDP Montenegro coordinating AI Strategy development.
Key milestones in Working Group engagements for AI Strategy development:
Constitutive Session (17 October 2025) – Established the foundation for the Strategy by defining key strategic directions for AI development, including governance and ethical frameworks, education and digital skills, and sectoral applications.
Second Session (19 January 2026) – Advanced the process through discussions on the methodological framework, key development phases, and alignment with international best practices/ European standards, with particular emphasis on digital infrastructure and data ecosystem challenges in Montenegro.
Strategic Workshop (13–14 February 2026, Budva) – Engaged in interactive sessions with national and regional experts, contributing to the identification of strategic directions, core pillars, priority application areas, key challenges and opportunities, and the mapping of the national AI ecosystem.
Third Session (27 March 2026) – Focused on defining the work plan until September 2026, including the organization of thematic stakeholder workshops, expert consultations, to ensure comprehensive insights, refining strategic objectives/measures, and support the drafting of the Strategy document.
The emerging strategic framework is built around several core pillars: digital infrastructure and data ecosystems, AI adoption across sectors, skills and capacity development, and regulatory and ethical AI frameworks, supported by appropriate governance mechanisms.
Participation of representatives from public, academic, industry, and civil sectors.
As a member of the Working Group, NCC Montenegro plays a key role in integrating high-performance computing (HPC) and advanced digital technologies into the national AI strategic framework by promoting HPC as a foundational enabler of AI development, supporting data-intensive AI innovations and applications, and aligning national priorities with European HPC and AI initiatives.
The development of the AI Strategy 2026–2030 represents a significant opportunity for Montenegro to strengthen its digital economy, foster innovation and competitiveness, enhance public services, and position itself within the broader European AI landscape. Through its active participation in this process, NCC Montenegro contributes to shaping a resilient, inclusive, and future-oriented AI ecosystem, grounded in robust infrastructure, accessible advanced technologies, skilled human capital, and strong collaborative governance.
We are proud to highlight PAID MNE as a featured success story in the EuroCC2 & EuroCC4SEE Booklet — demonstrating how HPC is transforming financial analytics and algorithmic trading.
EuroCC2 & EuroCC4SEE Booklet
At the heart of PAID MNE innovations lies PAID-T (Price Action Intelligent Detection Trading) — a smart trading platform that leverages advanced algorithms and AI/ML to dynamically adapt to market movements, optimise investment strategies, and manage risk with higher precision. Traditional computing systems quickly reached their limits. To unlock the required performance, the team scaled their solution to the LUMI supercomputer, one of Europe’s most powerful HPC infrastructures. By enabling multinode execution and real-time task distribution, PAID MNE achieved over 1.2 million simulations in under 5 hours — a process that previously would have taken days. This acceleration enables processing billions of historical transactions in hours instead of days, rapid identification of critical market patterns and data-driven optimisation/ increased accuracy of trading strategies.
PAID MNE success story
This achievement, showcased through the EuroCC2/EuroCC4SEE project, demonstrates how supercomputing is becoming a powerful enabler of business innovation. PAID MNE’s journey is a clear example of how HPC and AI together can transform complex, critical data into faster, more profitable decisions.
DeepMark is a deep-tech startup developing learning-based watermarking and provenance technology for AI-generated content. It previously used EuroHPC JU resources after receiving one year of access to the Leonardo Booster partition through a Development call. DeepMark leveraged these resources to advance next-generation watermarking research and benchmarking.
Deepmark
As the research deepened, the need for additional compute grew. Following consultations with the NCC Montenegro team at the University of Montenegro, DeepMark applied for GPU resources via the AI Factory Playground Access.
DeepMark has been awarded 5,000 GPU hours on the Leonardo Booster partition, granted for three months. This allocation will support work on robust, learning-based watermarking for AI-generated content—improving resilience to real-world edits and AI transformations and strengthening provenance and authenticity at scale. With this new allocation, DeepMark will expand its experiments and validation under real-world constraints.
The Uhura Solutions project “Generative AI Intelligent Process Automation Platform” has received a positive evaluation and has been granted an extension, including 4,500 node hours on the Leonardo BOOSTER HPC system for a 12-month period.
The additional HPC resources will support Uhura Solutions’ ongoing research and development in advanced Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) tailored for the financial sector. Leveraging Leonardo’s state-of-the-art computing capabilities, the project will scale experiments from smaller open-source models to larger LLMs, enabling deeper research into optimization techniques such as parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), quantization, pruning, and model alignment.
Leonardo HPC
The Generative AI Intelligent Process Automation Platform integrates fine-tuned LLMs, low-code development, and process automation workflows to significantly improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer experience in financial services. A key differentiator of the platform is its focus on industry-specific language and context, supported by carefully curated private datasets with strong attention to data quality, privacy, and compliance.
This extension and access to Leonardo BOOSTER represent a major milestone for the project. The additional computational power allows company to push the boundaries of financial-domain AI and accelerate the delivery of scalable, production-ready solutions for the European market
The Train the Trainer course was organized from 30 January to 5 February as a series of full-day, intensive lectures, delivered alongside the standard AI and multi-GPU computing courses. This workshop complemented the strong technical focus of the regular course with a dedicated educational track. While the regular course concentrated on hands-on skills for building, scaling, and optimizing AI workloads across multiple GPUs, the Train-the-Trainer track was specifically designed to equip future instructors with the knowledge and pedagogical tools needed to teach these topics effectively. With only a few HPC and AI centres across Europe offering such specialized education, this programme helps expand the network of trainers and institutions capable of delivering high-quality AI and multi-GPU courses at both national and European levels. Researchers from the National Competence Center (NCC) Montenegro participated in this course, further strengthening national capacities in advanced AI and multi-GPU training.
AI Train the Trainer Workshop
During the training event, participants developed a deep understanding of modern multi-GPU and distributed AI technologies, while also learning effective strategies for teaching these complex concepts. Guided by expert instructors, attendees explored state-of-the-art tools, frameworks, and best practices for scaling AI workloads, combined with pedagogical approaches, teaching materials, and hands-on experience tailored to support the delivery of their own courses. The lectures covered a broad spectrum of topics, including GPU architectures and access to HPC infrastructure; fundamentals of deep learning and the transition from CPU- to GPU-based workloads; distributed training with PyTorch (Distributed Data Parallel, model parallelism, PyTorch Lightning); large language models, fine-tuning techniques, and frameworks such as Hugging Face Accelerate and DeepSpeed; as well as computer vision, MLOps, Ray, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and hyperparameter tuning.
The training event was organised by NCC Poland, NCC Netherlands, NCC Hungary, NCC Belgium, NCC Italy, NCC Finland, NCC Sweden, all National Competence Centres for High-Performance Computing, CASTIEL2 and EuroCC2/EuroCC4SEE.
NCCs Montenegro, Italy, and Denmark held an online mentoring and twinning session (30.01.2026) focused on sharing valuable experiences and good practices in building initial industry contacts in the fields of HPC, HPDA, and AI. The discussion centred on practical approaches and lessons learned in engaging companies—particularly SMEs—and on transforming NCC technical expertise and resources into attractive, demand-driven service offerings.
EuroCC mentoring and twinning session
The NCCs shared concrete examples of mapping local ecosystems and working with key national stakeholders, strategic partners and industry intermediaries—including chambers of commerce, industry clusters, digital agencies, science and technology parks, start-up incubators/ accelerators, etc., and European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs)—to reach targeted companies and industry leaders. Collaboration models, including joint workshops, training activities, and project initiatives, were highlighted as effective means of promoting access to HPC and AI resources, expertise, and funding support.
The session also highlighted the importance of continuous visibility and coordinated outreach through channels such as LinkedIn, newsletters, and active participation in targeted conferences and networking events, as key enablers for promoting NCC services and strengthening industry uptake.
