National Competence Centre for High-Performance Computing
EuroCC NCC Montenegro website had over 10,000 visitors and over 25,000 visits during the last year. The number of visits was correlated with the organization of events, publishing od blog posts and announcements on social media. The overall stats since the website launch shows over 22,000 visitors and close to 60,000 visits. This is for the period from Jan 2021.
The Executive Office of American Chamber of Commerce and National Competence Centre for High Performance Computing Montenegro, organized joint workshop on innovative supercomputing technologies and applications on November 17th 2023 at University of Donja Gorica.
The AmCham member companies from various industry domains were greeted by Marko Mirocevic, AmCham Executive Director and Milica Vukotic, Dean of the Faculty for Information Systems and Technologies, emphasizing the importance digital acceleration and EuroCC2/Digital Europe project opportunities for enhancing industry innovations and competitiveness.
Representative of NCC Montenegro for industry cooperation, Sanja Nikolic introduced technical aspects and commercial applications of HPC systems, underlining transformative and innovative potential for the industry driven by integration of computational power (HPC/HPDA) and intelligent algorithms (AI/ML/DL). She also elaborated on EuroHPC supercomputing resources and access opportunities, as well as on possibilities for MNE companies to assess their HPC/AI readiness through HPC4SME self-evaluation tool (https://eurocc.udg.edu.me/hpc4sme-assessment-tool).
Representative of NCC Montenegro for service development, Luka Filipovic, presented new AI Master program and training courses, including Parallel Programing and Deep Learning, for enhancing HPC/AI skills, as well as other NCC services related to technical expertise, projects consultancy and preparation of use-cases for industry, academia and public sector. HPC/AI success stories in the areas of smart solutions for poultry farms, precise weather forecast in challenging topography of Montenegro, short-term predictive pricing in energy markets and personalized banking solutions, were presented in the constructive dialogues supported atmosphere.
AmCham members discussed challenges related to deploying AI models, issues with data availability and potential industry use-cases.
The joint event was great opportunity to promote supercomputing resources, applications and benefits available to Montenegrin companies, and to enhance industry interaction especially with the strategically aware and operationally proficient companies, to fully embrace future-proof technologies.
Media :
Representative of NCC Montenegro, Sanja Nikolic participated in the Round Table “Montenegrin Finance and Internationalization”, organized by Montenegrin Academy of Science and Art. On this event, topics related to the international competitiveness, financial opportunities and fast-paced digitalization with HPC&AI, were lively discussed with representatives of academia, banking sector, investment & trading institutions.
Mrs. Nikolic presented technical and commercial aspects of HPC systems and emphasized HPC/AI powered use cases in the financial services industry. EuroCC/EuroCC2 supercomputing opportunities and NCC Montenegro activities related to HPC/AI study programs, trainings and industry success stories were also elaborated.
Event in media :
Thanks to EuroCC2 team from Montenegro, EuroCC and 27th International Scientific and Professional Conference – Information technology IT2023 were featured in the June issue of IEEE Region 8 News magazine (Vol 4 No 2). You can access the full issue at the following link. The News bulletin is published quartterly and distributed to over 80000 IEEE members in Region 8.
On World Telecommunications and Information Society Day, prof. Dr. Tomo Popović was invited to participate in the morning TV program on national television RTCG hosted by Ms. Andrea Sekularac. The discussion was about the current state of ICT in Montenegro, digital divide in Montenegro and throughout the world. The very important issue of education and capacity building necessary to address the challenges of digitization was also discussed. During the discussion, important issues of digital transformation, IT megatrends, and especially challenges related to artificial intelligence were touched upon.
FF4EuroHPC experiment AIMHIGH featured in national magazine Glasnik published by Montenegrin Chamber of Economy (Feb-Mar 2023 issue). The article provides summary and results of the FF4EuroHPC experiment called AIMHiGH that focuses on the use of HPC and AI for developing computer vision solutions for smart farming solutions in poultry sector. The focus of the article is to provide an insight on how HPC can be utilized by SMEs, in this case focused on digital innovation, to provide smart solutions for agri-food sector. The full version of the magazine can be accessed here.
Within the FF4EuroHPC experiment, DigitalSmart Montenegro, together with DunavNET, University of Donja Gorica, Radinovic Company, and Meso-promet Franca, used HPC and AI to develop ML prediction models for computer vision that can be ported on Edge AI and integrated into Smart agriculture systems for poultry farms.
The smart agriculture solution developed within this experiment could boost the productivity of poultry farms by potentially reducing both manual labor costs and chicken mortality rates by about 10% each. This is accomplished because assessing the weight of chickens in real-time increases the uniformity of the finished product and reduces the impact of stress on both the chickens and manual labor. Furthermore, real-time insight into poultry barns allows for improving disease management due to early detection.
HPC provided the technology organisations DigitalSmart Montenegro and DunavNET needed to develop smart agriculture solutions quickly and efficiently using machine learning and computer vision, in this case for the needs of the poultry industry. The computer kit has become a part of the PoultryNET platform offering, and there is an opportunity to sell such components to third-party vendors active in the market of smart agriculture solutions.