Community Centres of Excellence

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-01-02 and HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-03.

The call is expected to support:

• The development of HPC-ready applications with clearly defined objectives and a clear roadmap for bringing the targeted applications to the next level of maturity and scalability.
• A user-driven approach, connecting CoEs with developers, HPC users, industrial and scientific communities.
• Ensuring coordinated efforts with EuroHPC, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Factories, and national HPC programs.

Community CoEs should clearly define the targeted application(s), user communities, and performance needs, while presenting a detailed development plan with key performance indicators (KPIs), milestones, and deliverables and show European added value.

All Community CoEs should be driven by user needs and specifically target European users beyond the CoE consortium to create wider impact. CoEs should be inherently committed to co-design activities (e. g. in collaboration with any relevant transversal CoE) 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 user communities from EU widening countries and countries associated to Horizon Europe that are members of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking currently developing and advancing their HPC infrastructure and ecosystem.

Proposals should be able to articulate clearly the scientific grand challenges (e.g. fusion energy, defeating cancer, storage battery, or AI-driven cybersecurity) which will be addressed by the applications and justify the advanced HPC performance needs.

Proposals should also develop synergies with preceding and existing CoEs where relevant. Should the proposed work target an area or domain already covered by former or existing CoEs, proposals must clearly elaborate on how their proposal further expands beyond previous work (e.g. new codes, codes upgraded/enhanced or ported to exascale/post-exascale/AI-optimized domains, new user communities, etc.), and avoid any kind of work duplication/overlap.