The success stories in the EuroCC 2024 booklet span a diverse range of sectors, including:
IT and Software
Natural Sciences and Aeronautics
Environment, Energy, and Agriculture
Pharmacy and Medicine
Manufacturing and Engineering
Finance and Mobility
Public and Communication
These stories showcase achievements and innovations across multiple industries, highlighting the wide-reaching impact of EuroCC initiatives.
One of the featured success stories highlights the collaboration between NCC Montenegro and the Montenegrin company Fleka, showcased through the project “Personalized Banking Software Solutions.” This partnership shows how local innovation can create custom ML predictions for the banking sector and personalized financial-tech sector.
Discover inspiring success stories that highlight innovative achievements across Europe.
The Montenegrin National Center of Competence in High Performance Computing (NCC Montenegro) invites Montenegrin companies to take advantage of the unique opportunity to improve their business using advanced HPC technologies and artificial intelligence and apply for the FFplus call for business experiments and innovative studies. NCC Montenegro, as a center that coordinates initiatives in the field of HPC at the national level, will provide support in the assessment of the company’s readiness for HPC and AI, but also in the selection of EuroHPC JU resources and in finding partners in accordance with expertise and potential.
FFplus is a European initiative that highlights and promotes the adoption of High Performance Computing (HPC) by SMEs and start-ups across Europe. The scope of targeted actions includes solving business challenges through computer methods (modeling and simulation, data analytics) on HPC systems, as well as the use of supercomputer resources for the development of software solutions and (generative) artificial intelligence (AI) services.
With more than a decade long history and a strong reputation in Europe, the Fortissimo projects (Fortissimo 1 and 2, FF4EuroHPC) received a budget of 42.8 million euros and successfully performed more than 130 experiments involving more than 300 partners. These efforts have resulted in 120 success stories from over 20 EU countries, where SMEs have developed new products and services with the help of high-performing computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence, thereby boosting the EU economy. Building on the methods and achievements of the Fortissimo project series, the FFplus call, with a total budget of EUR 30.0 million, including EUR 24.0 million for SMEs and startups, will continue to support and empower SMEs and startups towards innovations.
SMEs and start-ups now have the opportunity to convey their innovative potential through two types of open calls of the FFPlus project (open until September 4th, 2024):
Business experiments will address HPC adoption by SMEs to address specific business challenges of SMEs that have not previously used or had no experience with HPC services.
The maximum request for financing per proposal is 200,000 euros. Expected duration of the experiments: a maximum of 15 months with a planned start on January 1st, 2025.
Per application, it is possible to have a maximum of five partners in the consortium
The call is intended for experiments involving innovative, agile SMEs, focused on innovations resulting from the use of advanced HPC services.
Innovation studies will support European SMEs and start-ups already active in the field of generative AI technology, which lack the necessary computing resources to scale up.
The maximum total funding for each innovation study is 300,000 euros. Expected duration of the experiments: a maximum of 10 months with a planned start on December 1st, 2024.
A maximum of three partners are allowed per application. There are no indirect costs.
Creating history: the first Montenegrin success story in the Fortisimo project
Within the framework of the five-day Fortissimo call, FF4EuroHPC, the consortium with the support of NCC Montenegro, which included Montenegrin partners DigitalSmart doo (coordinator), Radinović Company, Meso-Promet Franca, University of Donja Gorica, and DunavNET from Serbia, implemented a successful pilot project-experiment AIMHIGH in which partners used HPC, machine learning and IoT technology in agriculture to develop a new solution for monitoring and predicting diseases among poultry.
Are you ready for supercomputing and artificial intelligence?
Montenegrin companies that want to find out if they are ready to use supercomputers and AI technologies in their business can do so by filling out the HPC4SME company assessment tool and find out if and how the organization can benefit from free supercomputer services. Companies that are interested in carrying out the assessment and filling out the questionnaire will be additionally supported by the Montenegrin National Competence Center NCC Montenegro.
For more information about the call, you can visit the website of the FFplus project: https://www.ffplus-project.eu/ or contact the Montenegrin National Competence Center (NCC Montenegro) directly at luka.filipovic@udg.edu.me or sanja.nikolic@udg.edu.me
NCC Montenegro successfully submitted the proposal No. EHPC-BEN-2023B12-015 High-Resolution Weather Prediction Model for Montenegro, to the EuroHPC Benchmark Access Call, in cooperation with Institute of Hydrometeorology and Seismology of Montenegro (IHMS) on VEGA CPU for the period 15.01.-15.04.2024. The project aimed to leverage the EuroHPC resources to establish and benchmark precise weather forecast models in the complex topography of Montenegro, utilize these models to refine existing meteorological models, and ultimately enhance the accuracy of weather forecasts, particularly for severe weather events.
Simulations used the Weather Research and Forecasting Non-Hydrostatic Mesoscale Model (WRF-NMM) combining advanced numerical techniques with HPC, for studying atmospheric phenomena with high spatial and temporal resolution and providing accurate and efficient simulations of regional weather patterns. Key activities included installing and fine-tuning the model based on previous verification results, preparing input data, running and fine-tuning the model, and analyzing results in the context of weather prediction and parallel computing performance. WRF model is tested on complex Montenegrin terrain on resolutions 0.5km, 1km, 3km, and 5km. Application scalability was tested on up to 8 nodes, running up to 1024 tasks simultaneously. Simulations were executed for different timespans, but results/overall execution time was scaled to one day period to calculate application speedup and efficiency.
Vega HPC has significantly enhanced research capabilities, allowing to achieve results more quickly and with greater accuracy: scalability was successfully tested on 64-512 CPU cores and the model was successfully downscaled to the resolution of 0.5 km. The final report on granted EUROHPC JU Benchmark Access and effective utilization of the VEGA CPU system assigned is submitted.
PAID-T (Price Action Intelligent Detection Trading) is a scalable software solution for investment funds, banks, brokers and digital banks that automatically analyzes markets, executes trades and optimizes trading. The basis of the solution is the awareness of the context when the most potent moment for trading is, the ability to quickly adapt to new market conditions, as well as rigorous rules for risk management.
PAID-T uses mathematical models for statistical data processing (big data), instrument price detection algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence and blockchain technology to create a unique trading experience.
Using the Lumi supercomputer will help us significantly speed up historical testing. Before using Lumi resources, our tests took an average of 6 days. We now expect to be able to complete testing between 5 and 12 hours depending on the number of parameters used.
The PAID-T has been supported by NCC Montenegro providing technical consultation, HPC systems expertise, and support regarding the application process for EuroHPC Development Call on LUMI (CPU partition). HPC infrastructure access was approved and provided for 12 months.
During 28th international IT IEEE conference in Zabljak, Montenegro, the EuroCC2 HPC/HPDA/AI Workshop gathered together presenters from 6 NCCs and 5 companies providing a brief overview on more than 20 PoCs, use cases, and success stories, driven by computationally-intensive demand and innovative application portfolio. The workshop was attended by almost 140 participants from academia and industry (up to 60 joining virtually and another 80 in person), who had an opportunity to gain valuable insights and deepen their understanding of HPC benefits within industrial, interdisciplinary and international context.
The workshop was opened by Panayiota Katsamba’s presentation on NCC Cyprus’ strategic framework for industry steering, emphasizing the importance of cohesive pitching and managing companies’ expectations through the industry scout concept which resulted in numerous success stories.
Colleagues from Slovenia, Mrs Tina Crnigoj Marc from Arctur d.o.o. presented an HPC4SME automated tool designed for assessing Cloud HPC readiness among the companies, while Saso Knez, CEO of AFormX, shared insights on advanced aviation projects, talking about challenges on light aircraft configuration that were successfully addressed by HPC resources and simulations.
Three Montenegrin IT companies presented their AI-driven or HPC-supported industry cases. Ivan Boskovic, CEO of ITAS introduced us to their software solutions and business perspective in integrating LegalTech and FinTech opportunities. Ivan Soc, CEO of FiveGroup, discussed about EdTech tools and services, and ambitions to enhance classroom learning through VR/AR/Gaming-based experiences.. Marko Lekic, CTO of Fleka presented personalized banking software solutions, SKEN App – personal expense tracker, and ML/NLP-based classification algorithm developed with the support of HPC expert Luka Filipovic from NCC Montenegro, which enables automatic categorization of consumer transactions into spending categories.
At the beginning of the second part of the workshop, Ozlem Sari demonstrated NCC Turkey’s industry excellence, through well-structured industry interaction, PoC evaluation and HPC onboarding process, resulting in 12 Success Stories in various technology and industry domains.
Andreea Dinu and Sebastian Murau from Romania shared their NCC experience on opportunities and challenges in fostering productive industry interaction, elaborating further on use cases and study cases. Following them, Andreea Moga from the Netherlands successfully presented their NCC industry services, engagement and customer journey process, followed by inspirational PoC/use cases including the development of AI models based on satellite data for soil nutrient monitoring/regenerative agriculture or AI models based on drone data to calculate oil spills surface and thickness.
The workshop concluded with Petre Lameski’s presentation, highlighting HPC use cases that promote industry collaboration within NCC North Macedonia: Scalable Electricity Meters Data Processing with 42Dynamics, Voucher Generation case with Interctec and Automated Transcription Tool with Hate Speech Analysis use case for Agency for Audio ad Audiovisual Media Services.
NCC Spain, NCC Netherlands, NCC Slovenia, NCC Cyprus and NCC Montenegro organized collaborative” Supercomputing INFO DAY” where companies from different industries shared their experience on using HPC infrastructure which improved their products and services, optimized business workflows and elevate industry competitiveness. Participants had the opportunity to explore how they could access supercomputing resources for free and in an easily accessible manner.
Marko Lekic, Fleka CTO, company shown personalized banking software solutions and improvements using NLP and ML classification algorithm.
The Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) of The Cyprus Institute hosted a landmark “Industry Day” on Tuesday, January 16, 2024, organized within the framework of the EUROCC2 project.
During the Industry Day event , a representative from DigitalSmart Stevan Čakić from Montenegro presented the AIMHiGH project in a segment titled “Another success story from a past collaboration between industry and research.” The focus of the presentation was on how the project integrates high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) into poultry farming, creating innovative solutions for the agricultural sector. The collaboration, part of the H2020 initiative and the FF4EuroHPC application experiments, was highlighted as a prime example of successful partnership between industry and academia, driving forward technological advancement in agriculture. This concise presentation underscored the significance of collaborative efforts in bringing about cutting-edge innovations in traditional sectors.
