On July 25, the Luxembourg Ministry of Economy announced the launch of a joint call for projects, in partnership with the National Research Fund (FNR) and Luxinnovation, open to companies and research institutions wishing to leverage High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities in their research activities. To support interested parties in their efforts, Luxinnovation is setting up an online platform, research-industry-collaboration.lu, where applicants can submit their projects from September 15 to November 15.

Luxembourg intends to be one of the European leaders in the field of digitalization. Moreover, it is the initiator of the strategy for the implementation of the European HPC network that gave rise to the EuroHPC initiative, a concrete follow-up to the declaration signed in March 2017 in Rome by Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands. The initiative, which is headquartered in the Grand Duchy, is jointly financed by the participating countries and private members, its budget amounts to approximately 7 billion euros for the period 2021-2027.

In June 2019, following a call for projects, EuroHPC selected the eight sites that would host the supercomputers, the Luxembourg project to locate the petascale supercomputer MeluXina at LuxConnect in Bissen was selected and obtained European co-funding.

At the inauguration of the 10-petaflop MeluXina supercomputer on June 7, 2021, Franz Fayot, Luxembourg’s Minister of the Economy, said:

“Our goal is to make the supercomputer accessible to everyone. We have set up a national HPC competence center that provides operational support and user training. The Ministry of the Economy also has funding instruments for R&D and innovation that can be used to support HPC projects. We will help companies have the right tools to seize the opportunities of the data economy.”

The call for HPC projects

Despite all the benefits provided by HPC, including reduced R&D costs through simulations and virtual prototyping, it is not widely used in the private sector, often due to a lack of expertise, whether in scaling numerical simulations or performing big data analysis on large computing systems.

The joint JPA therefore aims to ” stimulate the implementation of high-quality, high-impact and innovative industrial research projects that use HPC to accelerate the digital transformation process of companies by integrating computer-aided engineering, design and analytics, and HPC into their innovation process.”

It also aims to encourage and facilitate collaborative projects between research institutes and companies. It is particularly aimed at companies with significant expertise in the field of computer-aided R&D, big data analysis or artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm training, but with little or no expertise in the use of HPC infrastructures, and therefore needing the support of a public research institute to successfully transfer to HPC.

Expected research projects

Research projects must be innovative and require significant allocations of computing and data storage resources. Applications should specify why the work requires access to an HPC facility and cannot be performed on a smaller computing system. Thematic areas include manufacturing, advanced engineering, materials, energy and environmental technologies, and telecommunications.

The joint call for projects targets industrial research projects in the following HPC application areas:

• AI and ML algorithms;
• Complex simulations with multiple parameters;
• Virtual testing and optimization (of new product designs, processes, complex materials);
• Big data analysis and visualization;
• Prediction and forecasting of complex models.

To connect companies and research organizations, Luxinnovation, the national agency for the promotion of innovation, has set up the platform “Research-industry-collaboration.lu”. Companies and public research actors are invited to submit their project ideas from September 15 to November 15, 2022.

Translated from Luxembourg : le Ministère de l’Economie lance son premier appel à projets dans le domaine du High Performance Computing