The FF4EuroHPC proposal addresses the need for outreach to, and support of, Europe’s Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in order that they can profit from the innovation advantages offered by advanced High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies and services. FF4EuroHPC takes core team members from the highly successful Fortissimo and Fortissimo-2 projects (hereinafter simply Fortissimo projects) which executed 92 business experiments. They will use the lessons learned and best practices developed in those projects to create a portfolio of business-oriented “application experiments” that allow agile SMEs to investigate and solve business challenges and develop innovative business opportunities. The application experiment framework ensures that they receive the necessary, appropriate support to enter into the HPC ecosystem. FF4EuroHPC will lower the barriers for the participating SMEs to commence HPC-related innovation in their existing or newly identified markets either by using HPC systems for their business needs or by providing new HPC-based services. The outcome will be improved design and development processes, better products and services, and improved competitiveness in the global marketplace. Fundamentally, FF4EuroHPC is focussed on the creation of economic growth and jobs for the European Union.

CASTIEL´s mission is to contribute to the success of the activities of the National Competence Centres (as realized in the Research and Innovation Action (RIA) in the same call – EuroHPC-04-2019 by tackling both the maintenance and strengthening of excellence, while identifying and closing gaps due to the diverse levels of maturity between the different nations. CASTIEL will therefore bring together a core consortium to setup a framework of activities that will support the evolution of each single National Competence Centre and enable them step by step to get closer together in terms of capabilities and expertise. The greatest challenge hereby is the integration of the single nations into the overall strategy at European level while preserving their autonomy and without interfering with their national strategy. This will address, the challenge of maximising existing European HPC knowledge and expertise across Europe, and CASTIEL will take the role of a single and central reference point at European Level to coordinate and support the National Competence Centres.

High performance Computing is becoming a fundamental tool for the progress of science and engineering and as such for economic competitiveness. The growing complexity of parallel computers is leading to a situation where code owners and users are not aware of the detailed issues affecting the performance of their applications. The result is often an inefficient use of the infrastructures. Even when the need to get further performance and efficiency is perceived, code developers may not have sufficient insight on its detailed causes for addressing the problem properly. This may lead to blind attempts to restructure codes and consequent lack of efficiency. The objective of POP is to operate a Centre of Excellence in Computing Applications in the area of Performance Optimisation and Productivity. POP will offer the service of precisely assessing the performance of computing application of any sort, from a few hundred to many thousand processors. Also, POP will show its Customers the issues affecting the performance of their code and the most optimal way to alleviate them. POP will target code owners and users from all domains, including infrastructure operators, academic and industrial users. The estimated population of such applications in Europe is 1500 and within the project lifetime POP has the ambition of serving over 150 such codes. The Added Value of POP’s services is the savings generated in the operation and use of a code, which will result in a significant Return on Investment (fixing a code costs less than running it below its optimal levels) by employing best-in-class services and release capacity for resolving other priority issues. POP will be a best-in-class centre. By bringing together the European world-class expertise in the area and combining excellent academic resources with a practical, hand-on approach, it will improve the access to computing applications, thus allowing European researchers and industry to be more competitive.

The key element to ensure efficient use of HPC infrastructures is to optimize the performance and efficiency of the applications. The Centre of Excellence on Performance Optimization and Productivity (POP CoE, www.pop-coe.eu) was initiated in October 2015 with the fundamental purpose of assisting a broad community of HPC application developers and users in both science and industry domains helping them to understand the performance-related issues of their applications and thus improve their efficiency and productivity. This fundamental purpose is reached by externally and objectively auditing the performance of the codes to all interested users, by providing not only qualitative but also quantitative analysis through the use of POP tools and methodology. The current proposal, Performance Optimization and Productivity 3 (POP3), is articulated in 3 main pillars: services, users, and co-design. POP services mainly focus on performance assessments with the goal to evaluate code performance and scaling, identifying the main sources of inefficiency and providing some insight and recommendation about how to improve it. POP3 also provides second level services that have been extended and include proof of concepts, energy efficiency and advisory studies. Although POP3 will continue targeting all scales and types of users, with this proposal we will focus our efforts on larger scales, assessing the execution on the EuroHPC sites of some of the European flagship HPC applications for other CoEs. However, POP3 will still provide services to prescribers and SMEs to promote an efficient usage of the computing resources. The co-design will be covered in two dimensions. Internally in POP3 we will co-design the tools and methodology to be able to analyse the applications on the selected platform at the selected scale. Externally, POP3 will identify best practices and kernels that will be offered to other European projects as well as the wide audience of parallel applications.

The growing complexity of parallel computers is leading to a situation where code owners and users are not aware of the detailed issues affecting the performance of their applications. The result is often an inefficient use of the infrastructures. Even in the cases where the need to get further performance and efficiency is perceived, the code developers may not have insight enough on its detailed causes so as to properly address the problem. This may lead to blind attempts to restructure codes in a way that might not be the most productive ones. POP2 extends and expands the activities successfully carried out by the POP Centre of Excellence since October 2015. The effort in the POP project resulted in more than 120 assessment services provided to customers in academia, research and industry helping them to better understand the behaviour and improve the performance of their applications. The external view, advice, and help provided by POP have been extremely useful for many of these customers to significantly improve the performance of their codes by factors of 20% in some cases but up to 2x or even 10x in others. The POP experience was also extremely valuable to identify issues in methodologies and tools that if improved will reduce the assessment cycle time. The objective of POP2 is to continue and improve the POP project operating a Centre of Excellence in Computing Applications in the area of Performance Optimisation and Productivity with a special focus on very large scale towards exascale.POP2 will continue the service oriented activity, giving code developers, users and infrastructure operators an impartial external view that will help them improve their codes. We will still target the same categories of users and focus on identifying performance issues and proposing techniques that can help applications in the direction of exascale. Our objective is to perform 180 services over a three year period.