Call for Applications: Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL)

This is a call for proposals for EU action grants in the field of High Performance Computing (Specific Objective 1) under the Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL).

Objective

Central objective of the action is to empower SMEs with advanced computational capabilities on the basis of HPC, enabling them to drive innovation, enhance competitiveness, and overcome challenges in the digitisation of R&D and business processes. By promoting HPC adoption, the action will unlock new opportunities, accelerate growth, and foster economic development for SMEs. Stimulating the HPC innovation potential of SMEs aims to position SMEs as technology leaders, fuel their success, and contribute to the overall advancement of industries and economies.

Scopes

• Proposals are expected to define an outreach approach for identifying and attracting SMEs whose innovation potential and competitiveness will be significantly increased by the uptake of advanced HPC services. A mechanism involving financial support to third parties through open calls will adequately stimulate such innovation potential of SMEs participating in the action. The action supports SMEs to solve specific business challenges through uptake of HPC.
• The EuroHPC JU considers that a contribution from the EU of up to EUR 30 million and a duration of 4 years would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nevertheless this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals with another duration or requesting other amounts.

Available Budget

The available call budget is EUR 30 000 000.

Expected Outcome

Stimulating the HPC innovation potential of SMEs will lead to:

• Enhanced European competitiveness in the market by enabling SMEs to perform efficiently using HPC, e.g. simulations, computational modelling and data-intensive analytics.
• Accelerated innovation by novel ideas, in-depth research and development of cutting-edge solutions through faster prototyping, optimisation and experimentation etc. enabled by HPC.
• Improved productivity and efficiency by reducing production cycles as complex computations can be completed in significantly less time and resources can be allocated more efficiently.
• Expanded business opportunities and opening new markets by the uptake of services enabled for instance by large-scale simulations, data analysis, large language models or machine learning utilising HPC resources
• Widening the HPC user base by attracting new users of HPC in different application domains.

Eligible Activities

• Projects should take into account the results of projects supported by other EU funding programmes. The complementarities must be described in the project proposals.
• Projects must be implemented on behalf of EuroHPC JU with clear visibility of EuroHPC JU as funding body of the action, clear association of the training platform and call for participation in the International HPC Summer School with the EuroHPC JU and appropriate prominence of the EuroHPC JU logo in all related communication and dissemination activities. Projects must comply with EU policy interests and priorities (such as environment, social, security, industrial and trade policy, etc).
• Financial support to third parties is allowed in this call under the following conditions:
  • the calls must be open, published widely and conform to EU standards concerning transparency, equal treatment, conflict of interest and confidentiality
  • the outcome of the call must be published on the participants’ websites, including information on the number of received applications, awarded grants.

Eligibility Criteria

• In order to be eligible, the applicants (beneficiaries and affiliated entities) must:
  • be legal entities (public or private bodies)
  • be established in one of the eligible countries, i.e.
  • EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories (OCTs))
  • non-EU countries
• Beneficiaries and affiliated entities must register in the Participant Register — before submitting the proposal — and will have to be validated by the Central Validation Service (REA Validation). For the validation, they will be requested to upload documents showing legal status and origin.
• Other entities may participate in other consortium roles, such as associated partners, subcontractors, third parties giving in-kind contributions, etc.

For more information, visit European Commission.