Transversal Centres of Excellence

Expected Outcome:

The Transversal CoEs will play a pivotal role in strengthening the European HPC and AI ecosystem by providing dedicated critical expertise, tools, and services to support HPC application developers and advanced users in addressing cross-cutting challenges. In particular, they should lead to the following outcomes:

• Enhanced performance and efficiency of HPC/AI applications, achieved through dedicated support to application developers, including in-depth performance assessments, tailored optimization recommendations, proof-of-concept implementations, correctness-checking, energy-efficiency studies, and continuous advisory services.
• Stronger integration of tool development with application user and developer needs, by implementing effective feedback loops focusing on advanced profiling, debugging, and performance-tuning solutions and other aspects of relevance. This integration will benefit multiple application communities, and such benefits should be clearly described and justified in the project proposals - ideally including ways to quantify the positive impact on these communities by the end of the project.
• Enhanced interoperability across the computing continuum including but not limited to interoperability cloud and HPC/AI environments, addressing key challenges such as security, data privacy, resilience, and fault tolerance, and prioritising energy-efficient software optimisation to enhance system sustainability.
• Increased and improved knowledge transfer and skills development in HPC and AI integration, through structured training programs provided by transversal CoEs. These could include workshops, hands-on tutorials, and webinars on topics such as HPC performance optimisation, AI-enhanced applications, and hybrid cloud-HPC/AI workflows, ensuring broad access to cutting-edge expertise across Europe.
• Stronger coordination and collaboration across the European HPC ecosystem, with transversal CoEs serving as key enablers of knowledge and best-practice exchange in a specific, coherent and cross-cutting technical domain. By engaging with Community CoEs, Lighthouse Codes, the Support Centre for HPC-powered AI Applications and national/EU-funded initiatives, they will foster synergies across academia, industry, and research institutions to accelerate the adoption of advanced technical solutions.
• Uptake of new tools, technologies, methods and processes by HPC application developers to support, for example, the modernisation and refactoring of codes, portability, the adoption of malleability concepts, and faster R&D cycles through rapid testing and delivery of new code to users.

Objective:

Transversal Centres of Excellence (CoEs) will play a strategic role in enabling the next generation of high-performance computing (HPC) applications by providing essential expertise, tools, and support to European HPC application developers. As the demand for computational power, AI integration, and large-scale simulations continues to grow, it is critical to establish technical hubs that can bridge the gap between cutting-edge HPC infrastructure and application developers. These centres will streamline software development and deployment, optimize performance, and facilitate the adoption of best practices, standards, and emerging HPC technologies across diverse scientific and industrial domains.

Transversal Centres of Excellence will increase adoption and broader dissemination of state-of-the-art HPC software development tools, technologies, and best practices among HPC application developers. They will strengthen technical skills and expertise within the HPC application development community and will harmonize performance standards and metrics for HPC applications and systems, ensuring consistency across the European HPC ecosystem.

This action aims to establish Transversal Centres of Excellence (CoEs) that serve as technical hubs for HPC application developers. These CoEs will provide specialised technical support in areas such as application profiling, pre-/post-processing, performance optimization, application delivery, co-design, and the integration of data and AI technologies. The initiative will help to streamline and enhance the development, deployment, and optimization of HPC applications across different domains.

Scope:

This call builds upon and complements HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-COE-03-01 and HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-COE-01-01 and should associate where relevant with the following actions: HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-01, and HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-03.

Proposals must address one specific, well-defined and coherent transversal technical area that supports HPC application development. The focus will be on pooling European expertise and resources to provide technical assistance and services to HPC application developers, for example in one or several of the following cross-cutting domains (this list is not exhaustive and very different topics can be proposed, explaining in each case how diverse application communities will benefit from the proposed developments):

• Application profiling and performance optimization
• Application deployment and delivery
• Application portability
• Co-design and cooperation with HPC vendors and architects
• Automated testing, validation, integration and delivery of applications and code
• Code adaptation to computing continuum (HPC cloud, etc)
• Data processing, interoperability, reusability, and standardization
• Resilience and Fault tolerance
• Security and data privacy
• Heterogeneous, energy-efficient computing and system scalability

Transversal CoEs will offer advanced training on commonly used HPC development tools and technologies, with close collaboration with the AI Factories, EuroHPC Academy and existing EuroHPC training activities. Proposals are expected to contribute substantially to the EuroHPC’s training portfolio, ensuring accessibility and knowledge transfer across European HPC/AI communities.

Additionally, proposals should establish strong links with other initiatives under the EuroHPC Applications and Technologies pillar, including:

• Community CoEs
• Energy-efficient computing technologies
• Microprocessor and system software development
• Middleware solutions
• Common standards and metrics for HPC architectures Transversal CoEs will also play a crucial coordination role, bridging activities funded by EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) calls, particularly between application developers and domain-specific Community CoEs.

Transversal CoEs will also play a crucial coordination role, bridging activities funded by EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) calls, particularly between HPC software engineers and Lighthouse Code developers as well as domain-specific Community CoEs.

Additional requirements:

• Consortia should include a balanced composition of partners, integrating HPC specialists and domain experts with relevant technical expertise as appropriate.
• The participation of private sector entities is strongly encouraged to enhance industry collaboration and impact.
• Maximize Impact through Collaboration. Proposals should establish strong links with Community CoEs, Lighthouse Codes, and the Support Centre for HPC-powered AI Applications, ensuring mutual benefit between HPC code developers and real-world users, engage with national and EU-funded projects, fostering technology transfer and best practices at the European level, and ensure involvement in broader AI and HPC initiatives, including RISC-V, European Processor Initiative (EPI), and emerging AI Factories.
• While deviations are permissible if adequately justified, proposals should generally allocate at least 12 person months of resources for collaboration activities with other grants awarded under this call. The pre-allocated resources will be assigned to a collaboration task which will be defined after the evaluation together with EuroHPC JU and relevant other grants.

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