Speakers
Description
Europe's HPC landscape keeps growing: EuroHPC systems, the new AI Factories, and a wider network of national centres and other providers all offer capacity that SMEs can, in principle, use. But demand already outstrips what is available, making access a genuinely competitive process, and access alone does not by itself create industrial impact. For many SMEs the barrier is often less the absence of supercomputers than the distance between a business problem and a working HPC-based solution: a need for enhanced skills, a landscape of access routes whose fit for SMEs is not always clear, or a question that lingers before applying — will the investment of time, effort and money actually pay off?
Drawing on CESGA's roles in FFplus (Fortissimo Plus) and EuroCC 3 (National Competence Centres), this session traces that chain end to end: EuroCC3 builds skills through training, offers consulting, and provides free resources through the EuroCC Spain Testbed; EuroHPC opens the access routes; and FFplus funds and supports SMEs through to impact — not only business impact, since FFplus SME outcomes span virtually any sector. Here are three of them: a Norwegian manufacturing SME that scaled from a Business Experiment into an Innovation Study, and a Portuguese environmental SME and a Spanish medical SME that both secured Innovation Study funding again in the second call — each turning that support into a capability their business didn't have before.
FFplus is the current chapter of the Fortissimo series, running since 2013. Of its six open calls, four have run since 2024, each with about €4 million for the SMEs and startups selected, split between Business Experiments, for HPC newcomers, and Innovation Studies, for AI-experienced companies scaling generative models. Funding covers the direct costs, largely technical staff time, of integrating HPC and AI. Eligible submissions have grown sharply, from 141 in the first two calls to 546 in the last two, the most recent of which drew 250 proposals in under 15 hours. Two more calls are still to open. Almost every European country has had at least one SME or startup funded; of the 76 funded so far, eight are from Spain and three from Portugal.
Recent discussions with funded sub-projects showed where support must reach further: connecting funded work to compute access. That gap sits deeper than logistics. Two examples illustrate it: FFplus selects sub-projects on business merit, while EuroHPC JU access calls apply their own, largely technical, criteria; and even eligible requests can be turned down simply for lack of capacity. FFplus is responding by pointing SMEs toward access-support services run by other EU projects, and by engaging directly with EuroHPC JU to help close that gap. The evidence covers what works and what still needs connecting; what could the centres and AI Factories in the IBERGRID community build on it?