Category: Industry collaboration

As part of its mission to strengthen high-performance computing (HPC) capacities in Montenegro, the National Competence Center (NCC) in HPC recently visited the local IT company Exploring, a growing SME known for its innovative data-driven solutions. The meeting served as an initial consultation aimed at introducing the EUROCC project, and presenting the range of support services provided by NCC Montenegro.

During the visit, the NCC Montenegro team provided an overview of the EUROCC initiative and the ongoing efforts to enhance digital innovation through HPC, artificial intelligence (AI), and related technologies. The Exploring team was introduced to the NCC self-assessment survey, a tool designed to help companies evaluate their readiness for adopting HPC technologies. In addition, we identified a potential use case to migrate Exploring’s development processes of ML prediction models for BI, which involve handling large datasets and developing prediction models, to the computing infrastructure managed by NCC Montenegro. This move could significantly improve computing performance and scalability for their internal R&D workflows.

The meeting also explored the possibility of:

• Launching a proof-of-concept (PoC) analysis to evaluate the benefits of HPC in a real-world scenario tailored to Exploring’s use case;
• Joint participation in upcoming open calls and EU-supported innovation programs;
• Establishing a long-term collaboration between Exploring and NCC Montenegro to unlock further innovation potential.

This consultation marks an important step toward bridging the gap between academic HPC expertise and the private sector’s innovation goals. NCC Montenegro looks forward to supporting Exploring in its digital transformation journey.

Fain Tech, a startup specializing in computer vision, with the support of the NCC Montenegro team, which is implementing the EuroCC2/EuroCC4SEE project, has successfully gained access to Leonardo BOOSTER HPC resources for a period of three months through the EuroHPC Benchmark public call. This access will support research on the Enfield: European Lighthouse to Manifest Trustworthy and Green AI project, aimed at developing advanced models for defect detection on PCBs.

With these resources, the team will focus on optimizing neural networks to create solutions that perform effectively even with limited data, minimizing the risk of overfitting. The team will demonstrate their capability to effectively use advanced computing resources, contributing to the development of reliable and sustainable technologies in industrial processes.

Five Group company has established itself as one of the leading IT companies in Montenegro in the field of 3D design, gaming industry, application of AI/ML in various business areas, for innovative IT solutions in the field of education, military industry, etc. With the support of the NCC team of Montenegro, Five Group company submitted an application for access to HPC resources on the Leonardo supercomputer, within the Benchmark call. As a result of the successful application for the project called “Wasco AI – Custom AI Assistant Optimization via HPC”, access to the Leonard Booster partition for three months, in the amount of 3500 node-hours, was granted.

Wasco AI is an intelligent, customized AI assistant designed for business applications. It supports multimodal interaction (text, video, images, and documents) and provides adaptive support to various industries. Through this project, benchmarking, training optimizations and fine-tuning of large language models (LLM) will be performed to ensure scalable performance, using EuroHPC resources.

After the initial meeting held in December 2024 at the premises of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Montenegro, NCC Montenegro team had several online meetings with representatives of One AI start-up company, in order to provide them support in writing application for access to HPC resources. One AI company has obtained grant from Innovation Fund of Montenegro for their project “AI Heal “, where they are developing a smart-phone application for monitoring different health parameters and obtaining AI advices based on the experiences of doctors across the world. Thus, the project deals with great amount of data which are going to be used for the training of AI Heal model. This cooperation with NCC Montenegro resulted in successful application on Development Call for resources on LUMI supercomputer.

On 8 April 2025, the NCC Montenegro team—Tomo Popović, Ivan Jovović, and Elvis Taruh—visited COINIS, a leading Montenegrin digital marketing and ad tech company, to discuss potential collaboration in high-performance computing (HPC) and AI. We were warmly welcomed by our hosts, Ms. Tamara Pavlović and Ms. Aida Ismailisufi.

The NCC team introduced the EUROCC2/EUROCC4SEE project and discussed how COINIS could leverage HPC resources for advanced data analytics, AI-driven personalization, and generative AI applications. Opportunities through EuroHPC calls, including FFPLUS, were presented, alongside examples of successful industry use cases.

Further collaboration was discussed, including POC project support and joint capacity-building activities. A follow-up is planned to define a concrete use case and collaboration with regards to a possible application process.