On July 25, the Luxembourg Ministry of the 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 take advantage of high performance computing (HPC) capabilities in their research activities. To support interested players in their efforts, Luxinnovation is setting up an online platform, research-industry-collaboration.lu, where candidates can submit their projects from September 15 to November 15.
Luxembourg intends to be one of the European leaders in the field of digitalisation. Moreover, he is the initiator of the strategy for setting up the European HPC network which 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. This initiative, 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 install the petascale supercomputer MeluXina at LuxConnect, in Bissen, was selected and obtained European co-financing.
During the inauguration of the 10 petaflops supercomputer MeluXina, on June 7, 2021, Franz Fayot, Minister of the Economy of Luxembourg, declared:
“Our goal is to make the supercomputer accessible to everyone. We have set up a national HPC skills center which provides operational support and user training. The Ministry of Economy also has R&D and innovation funding instruments 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 advantages provided by HPC, in particular the reduction of R&D costs thanks to simulations and virtual prototyping, it is little used in the private sector, often due to the lack of competence, whether to scale numerical simulations or perform big data analysis on large computing systems.
The Joint APP therefore aims to ” stimulate the implementation of high quality, high impact and innovative industrial research projects, which use high performance computing to accelerate the process of digital transformation of companies by integrating engineering, design and analytics computer-aided as well as high-performance computing in their innovation process. »
It also aims to encourage and facilitate collaborative projects between research institutes and businesses. It is particularly aimed at those with significant expertise in the field of computer-assisted R&D, big data analysis or training in artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, but who have little or no competence in the use of HPC infrastructures, and must therefore seek 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 resources and data storage. Applications should specify why the work requires access to an HPC framework and cannot be performed on a smaller compute system. Thematic areas are manufacturing, advanced engineering, materials, energy and environmental technologies, and telecommunications.
The joint call for projects targets industrial research projects in the following supercomputing application fields:
- AI and ML algorithms;
- Complex simulations with multiple parameters;
- Virtual testing and optimization (of new product designs, processes, complex materials);
- Analysis and visualization of big data;
- 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 “Research-industry-collaboration.lu” platform. Companies and public research actors are also invited to submit their project ideas from September 15 to November 15, 2022.