Category: Industry collaboration

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.

Members of the NCC Montenegro team, Prof. Dr. Enis Kočan, Prof. Dr. Nikola Žarić and Assist. Prof. Luka Filipović visited on Friday, March 28, the company PAID Montenegro, which represents an example of efficient use of HPC resources, as well as an example of good cooperation with NCC Montenegro. Namely, as part of the development of its stock exchange trading model, PAID-T, the company received access to HPC resources on the LUMI supercomputer in April 2024. Prior to this application, the NCC Montenegro team had several meetings with representatives of the PAID Montenegro company, where they were presented with the services of the national HPC competence center offered within the EuroCC2/EuroCC4SEE projects, and were also provided with support in completing the application for the Development call. Even before the expiration of the one-year deadline, through work on the development of the PAID-T model, the company has spent the allocated 15,000 node-hours on partition C of the LUMI supercomputer, and is already preparing a Report on the results and experiences so far.

Since the work on the development of the PAID-T model is not completed, the PAID Montenegro company plans to re-apply to one of the calls for access to supercomputer resources in Europe. Continuing the good cooperation, the NCC Montenegro team first presented the current and future calls organized within the EuroHPC JU ecosystem. Through an analysis of the expected future needs for HPC resources of the PAID-T company, taking into account the dynamics of publishing calls for access to HPC resources by the end of 2025, as well as the resources made available to users through these calls, it was proposed that the PAID-T company re-submit an application to the same type of call (Development call). It was suggested that they also apply for resources on the LUMI-G partition this time. It was agreed to continue contacts with the NCC Montenegro team and provide support in writing a new application for HPC resources.