Centres of Excellence for supporting supercomputing applications for Science and Innovation
HORIZON JU Research and Innovation Actions
Basic Information
- Identifier
- HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01-02
- Programme
- CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE FOR HPC APPLICATIONS
- Programme Period
- 2021 - 2027
- Status
- Closed (31094503)
- Opening Date
- January 27, 2022
- Deadline
- April 6, 2022
- Deadline Model
- single-stage
- Budget
- €45,000,000
- Keywords
- Digital Agenda
Description
Advancing the transition towards exascale capabilities by developing or scaling up existing parallel codes, resulting into effective applications to solve scientific, industrial or societal challenges and addressing the needs of the user communities.
Scope:The Centres of Excellence (CoE) address scientific and industrial applications and user communities that run world leading codes or ensembles that aggregate to pre-exascale workloads, and may require exascale resources in specific cases.
All CoEs should be user-driven and inherently committed to co-design activities to ensure that future HPC architectures are well suited for the applications and their users (both from academia and industry), providing a high performance and scalable application base.
CoEs should federate existing resources around Europe, exploiting available competences, and ensuring multidisciplinary (combining application domain and HPC system, software and algorithm expertise) and synergies with national/regional programmes.
CoEs should further enlarge and expand these capabilities all over Europe, in particular by including users communities from EU countries currently developing and advancing their HPC infrastructure and ecosystem (e.g. countries not currently hosting Tier 0 and/or Tier 1 supercomputing facilities).
Requirements for CoEs:
- The provision of services supporting different usage models for the community needs, including developing, maintaining, optimising (if needed re-designing) and scaling HPC application codes, addressing the full scientific/industrial workflow, particularly covering data aspects; testing and validating codes and quality assurance,
- Enhancing HPC applications and ensembles of coupled applications towards highly scalable, optimised codes.
- Streamline development, collaboration, automated testing and deployment processes throughout the application development and maintenance cycle, for example, by provisioning and using state-of-the-art development tools, platforms and software management models.
- Fostering pre-exascale-oriented codes and innovative algorithms that address societal challenges and/or are important for key scientific and industrial applications. Demonstration of clear societal, industrial, and/or scientific benefit is mandatory.
- Provision of codes aimed at capacity pre-exascale systems for ensemble workloads that might not need tight interconnection between runs. Proposals must convincingly demonstrate the ensemble pre-exascale capabilities and needs.
- Collaboration with EuroHPC JU systems and infrastructure federation initiatives to implement a robust and reliable automated deployment process for applications, in order to make novel developments timely available to the EuroHPC JU user communities.
- Involvement in co-design activities (hardware, software, codes), including the collaboration with HPC vendors and the identification of suitable applications relevant to the development of European HPC technologies towards exascale.
- Enlarging and expanding HPC applications development and use, in particular for new user communities in EU countries and countries associated to Horizon Europe that are members of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking currently developing and advancing their HPC infrastructure and ecosystem.
- Ensure wider access to codes and foster their uptake by user communities, in particular industry and SMEs.
- Federating capabilities and integrating communities around exascale computing in Europe.
- Address the skills gap in the targeted domain by specialised training and capacity building measures to develop the human capital resources for increased adoption of advanced HPC in industry and academia.
- Complementarity and synergy with National HPC Competence Centres and EU projects.
- Include clear KPIs on the optimal employment of current and/or emerging HPC technologies, allowing the assessment of the progress towards the objectives, both in terms of outputs and ultimate impact.
Proposals should ensure the cooperation with complementary projects launched by the EuroHPC JU including also the need to establish from the beginning of this cooperation appropriate IP exploitation agreements and should provide preliminary benchmarking data on new and emerging HPC technologies. Proposals should also clearly demonstrate that all partners in the consortium have a significant and justified role, including appropriate deliverables under their responsibility which cover their specific contributions.
Cross-cutting Priorities:Digital Agenda
Eligibility & Conditions
General conditions
1. Admissibility conditions: described in Annex A and Annex E of the Horizon Europe Work Programme General Annexes
The page limit of the application is 70 pages.
Proposal page limits and layout: described in Part B of the Application Form available in the Submission System
2. Eligible countries: described in Annex B of the Work Programme General Annexes
A number of non-EU/non-Associated Countries that are not automatically eligible for funding have made specific provisions for making funding available for their participants in Horizon Europe projects. See the information in the Horizon Europe Programme Guide.
3. Other eligibility conditions: described in Annex B of the Work Programme General Annexes
The conditions are described in General Annex B. The following exceptions apply:
In order to achieve the expected outcomes, and safeguard the Union’s strategic assets, interests, autonomy, and security, it is important to avoid a situation of technological dependency on a non-EU source, in a global context that requires the EU to take action to build on its strengths, and to carefully assess and address any strategic weaknesses, vulnerabilities and high-risk dependencies which put at risk the attainment of its ambitions.
Moreover, the HPC Applications Centres of Excellence (CoEs) will cover advances of targeted HPC applications towards highly scalable, optimised flagship codes and exascale performance, which are highly sensitive from a security and digital autonomy perspective, as they are part of Europe’s critical European HPC infrastructure and ecosystem whereby their integrity, resilience and security have to be duly safeguarded from cyber-attacks and other security threats, and given their key role in the functioning of EU’s data infrastructures and, given the potential sensitivity of the data processed (including for instance drug discovery testing and/or nuclear research simulations)
In addition, as the actions implemented by the CoE might address real time critical applications during emergency situations using dedicated supercomputing resources (meant to, for example, save lives by promptly forecasting and mitigating the impacts triggered by pandemics) the EU needs to avoid a situation of technological dependency on a non-EU source for close-to-market critical technologies.
Therefore participation is limited to legal entities established in Member States and legal entities established in countries associated to Horizon Europe that are members of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Proposals including entities established in countries outside the scope specified in the call/topic/action will be ineligible.
4. Financial and operational capacity and exclusion: described in Annex C of the Work Programme General Annexes
5. Evaluation and award:
- Award criteria, scoring and thresholds are described in Annex D of the Work Programme General Annexes
- Submission and evaluation processes are described in Annex F of the Work Programme General Annexes and the Online Manual
To ensure a balanced portfolio covering different domains, HPC applications and geographical areas, grants will be awarded not only in the order of ranking but also to proposals covering domains, communities and applications not represented in higher ranked proposals in the order of ranking provided that the applications attain all thresholds. In case of several proposals with significant overlap in scope, consortium composition or addressing applications that are subject to a higher ranked proposal, only the higher ranked proposal will be retained for funding.
- Indicative timeline for evaluation and grant agreement: described in Annex F of the Work Programme General Annexes
6. Legal and financial set-up of the grants: described in Annex G of the Work Programme General Annexes
As an exception from General Annex G of the Horizon Europe Work Programme, the EU-funding rate for eligible costs in grants awarded by the JU for this topic will be up to 50% of the eligible costs. In case a Participating State decided to entrust the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking with the management of its national contributions, this funding rate will be increased by the additional national funding rate for the eligible entities of this country.
Beneficiaries will be subject to the following additional dissemination obligations:
- Dissemination of training activities in collaboration with linked grants and relevant Coordination and Support Actions as a coordinated training programme
Beneficiaries will be subject to the additional exploitation obligations requiring that first exploitation of the results takes place in the European Union and the Participating States of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Applicants must acknowledge this requirement in the proposal and Annex I to the Grant Agreement.
Where justified, the grant agreement shall provide for the right for the Commission or the relevant funding body to object to transfers of ownership of results, or to grants of an exclusive licence regarding results, if: (a) the beneficiaries which generated the results have received Union funding; (b) the transfer or licensing is to a legal entity established in a non-associated third country; and (c) the transfer or licensing is not in line with Union interests.
Grants awarded under this topic will have to submit the following deliverable(s):
- Collaboration Plan
Beneficiaries will be subject to the following additional obligations regarding open science practices:
- Provision of software, algorithms and relevant information to use and validate applications without undue delay to the wider European HPC user community and in collaboration with linked actions
Grants awarded under this topic will be linked to the following action(s):
HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01-01
HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01-02
Specific conditions
7. Specific conditions: described in the EuroHPC JU Decision 28/2021 Work Plan 2022
Documents
Call documents:
Standard application form — call-specific application form is available in the Submission System
Standard application form (HE RIA, IA)
Standard evaluation form — will be used with the necessary adaptations
Standard evaluation form (HE RIA, IA)
MGA
Additional documents:
HE Main Work Programme 2021–2022 – 1. General Introduction
HE Main Work Programme 2021–2022 – 3. Research Infrastructures
HE Main Work Programme 2021–2022 – 7. Digital, Industry and Space
HE Main Work Programme 2021–2022 – 13. General Annexes
HE Framework Programme and Rules for Participation Regulation 2021/695
HE Specific Programme Decision 2021/764
Rules for Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity Assessment
EU Grants AGA — Annotated Model Grant Agreement
Funding & Tenders Portal Online Manual
Support & Resources
Online Manual is your guide on the procedures from proposal submission to managing your grant.
Horizon Europe Programme Guide contains the detailed guidance to the structure, budget and political priorities of Horizon Europe.
Funding & Tenders Portal FAQ – find the answers to most frequently asked questions on submission of proposals, evaluation and grant management.
Research Enquiry Service – ask questions about any aspect of European research in general and the EU Research Framework Programmes in particular.
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CEN-CENELEC Research Helpdesk and ETSI Research Helpdesk – the European Standards Organisations advise you how to tackle standardisation in your project proposal.
The European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for their recruitment – consult the general principles and requirements specifying the roles, responsibilities and entitlements of researchers, employers and funders of researchers.
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