EuroHPC-prosjekt EuroCC2 National Competence Centres for High Performance Computing (DIGITAL-EUROHPC-JU-2022-NCC-01)

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) is a large program to ensure European independence and resources in compute intensive calculations (High Performance Computing - HPC). National competence center for HPC is an initiative from EuroHPC JU started in 2020, where national competence centers were established in 33 participating countries. These national competence centers (NCC) are financed 50% by EuroHPC JU, and 50% by the member country, by KDD via NFR in Norway. This work, which was started in 2020, has now been continued in the program DIGITAL-EUROHPC-JU-2022-NCC-01-01. In Norway, NCC is implemented by Sigma2, with partners NORCE and SINTEF. NCC's tasks are to promote collaboration in Europe within HPC and help small and medium-sized Norwegian companies, and public administration to increase the use of HPC, for increased innovation and competitiveness. In Norway, NCC works with dissemination through publications, webinars and conferences, as well as practical projects with Norwegian companies producing success stories in a number of areas such as agriculture, process industry, extreme weather control, autonomous public transport, energy market, aquaculture and customs intelligence. The result of the work so far has been increased competitiveness and the enabling of new business opportunities, while at the same time we see great potential for value creation in companies that need a lot of computing power, or data analysis.

The aim of the EuroCC2 project is the operation of National HPC Competence Centres (NCCs) in the EuroHPC JU Participating States, and steer the competence center towards a sustainable operation model. It is a continuation of the closed EuroCC project. The Norwegian NCC has been successful in establishing collaboration with research institutes, industry, EDIH and AI hubs, and will continue this collaboration in EuroCC2 while extending the collaboration to include chambers of commerce and other clusters. Activities will ramp up in EuroCC2. The use cases that are already established will be used to further draw attention to the NCC and allow us to demonstrate for SMEs and public sector what can be achieved through adaption of HPC, fueling the establishment of additional use-cases.