FORTISSIMO – help SMEs to compete with large enterprises

5. 1. 2017 / Industry Fortissimo is producing new success stories with innovative European SMEs from manufacturing sector and fostering the future demand for HPC services.

Fortissimo project started in July 2013 and was successfully concluded in December 2016. Fortissimo2 project, expanding the activities of the original project, began in November 2015 and is currently achieving its most important objectives:

• creating new success stories of supercomputing with innovative SMEs,
• launching Cloud HPC platform Fortissimo Marketplace, and
• building the demand for HPC services for SMEs in future.  

SMEs participation is encouraged by funding opportunities through Open Calls. Open Calls are tenders within Fortissimo project with the aim to engage new end users - SMEs - and to conduct experiments in cooperation with team of Fortissimo experts, to prove the business value of HPC services. More than 100 European SMEs from manufacturing sector applied for the funding in the last open call, launched in autumn 2016. The results will be revealed within the next 4 weeks.

In both Fortissmo projects, Arctur is participating as a core partner. Among other tasks we are also providing HPC infrastructure and expertise to experiments, helping SMEs to achieve their expectations. 

The Fortissimo Marketplace provides all European businesses, in particular SMEs, with permanent, simple and cost-effective access to hardware, software, and know-how required for computationally-intensive digital simulations, via an on-demand, pay-per-use model. The Marketplace, lunched in October 2016,  is currently garnering b interest from manufacturing companies seeing to gain the benefits of supercomputing.

Professor Mark Parsons, CEO of Fortissimo Marketplace, sees a lot of potential for next years: “Throughout the Fortissimo project we’ve seen a significant increase in smaller businesses harnessing the availability of on demand low cost supercomputing power to model their business processes and products in ways that have previously only been possible for large enterprises. The availability of on demand supercomputing is a transformative technology that can help SMEs compete on a level playing field with large enterprises. “

All Fortissimo success stories are available by following this link: https://www.fortissimo-project.eu/success-stories. 

 

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement No 609029 and from the European European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 680481.