Second call for business experiments addressing the uptake of HPC by SMEs

The FFplus project, funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, is launching a second call for proposals focused on advancing the uptake of High-Performance Computing (HPC) by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) through “business experiments.” This initiative aims to enhance competitiveness and promote innovation within SMEs that have little to no prior experience with HPC technologies.

Eligible participants in this call primarily include SMEs and startups based in EU Member States, EEA countries, and nations associated with the Digital Europe Programme. Proposals can be submitted by one or more main participants, optionally including supporting participants, with a total consortium size limited to five partners.

The funding type is structured as a grant under Financial Support for Third Parties (FSTP), providing 100% funding for eligible direct costs, up to a maximum of 200,000 EUR per experiment, with a limit of 150,000 EUR per organization. The projects are expected to last for a maximum of 15 months, addressing specific business challenges through the implementation of HPC solutions.

The application process is an open call with a submission deadline set for August 26, 2025. The evaluation will follow a single-stage submission and will be conducted by independent experts. The evaluation criteria include industrial relevance, innovation potential, the quality of the work plan, and effective resource deployment.

No co-funding is required as the grants cover all eligible direct expenses, and indirect costs are not funded. The maximum funding budget aims to aid various sectors utilizing HPC for modeling, simulation, data analytics, and AI, aiming to create positive business impacts by showcasing successful case studies.

The project will also provide participants with technical support, assistance in accessing EuroHPC computing resources, and guidance in developing innovative solutions that address their business challenges. The objective is to create success stories that illustrate the benefits of HPC adoption and encourage broader uptake among the SME community.

Overall, this EuroHPC JU-funded call seeks to empower SMEs with cutting-edge computational capabilities, substantially enhancing their ability to innovate and compete in a digitalized marketplace.

The FFplus project, funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) under grant agreement number 101163317, is launching its second call for proposals for "business experiments" aimed at supporting the competitiveness and innovation potential of SMEs through the uptake of High-Performance Computing (HPC). The call, titled "Second call for business experiments addressing the uptake of HPC by SMEs," seeks to empower SMEs with advanced computational capabilities, enabling them to drive innovation, enhance competitiveness, and overcome challenges in the digitization of R&D and business processes. The total funding available for this call is 4,000,000 EUR.

The opening date for submissions is June 4th, 2025, and the deadline for submissions is August 26th, 2025, at 17:00 Brussels time. The expected duration of participation is linked to the duration of the sub-project.

The FFplus project will use open calls for proposals to select business experiments and innovation studies (referred to as sub-projects) that will be funded through Financial Support for Third Parties (FSTP). Over the project's duration, FFplus will provide over 24 million EUR to sub-projects selected through six open calls. Three calls will target SMEs using HPC to improve their business (business experiments), and three will target SMEs/Start-ups in generative artificial intelligence (innovation studies).

Third parties will receive 100% funding of incurred, eligible direct costs necessary for completing experiment activities. No indirect costs or overheads will be funded. The FFplus project receives funding based on a Grant Agreement following the regulations of the Digital Europe Programme, and the eligibility rules of that Grant Agreement will apply for the direct costs arising in the sub-projects.

Consortia selected for funding will be invited to conclude a funding agreement with the FFplus project coordinator, the University of Stuttgart. The funding agreement will define the payment schedule, with payments made in multiple tranches linked to the delivery of reports and outputs defined in the experiment workplan and the funding agreement itself. Experiment participants will receive an advance payment at the start, followed by subsequent installments.

Eligibility criteria and funding conditions include:

The experiments should address the business challenges of an SME new to HPC use, and that SME may participate in only one experiment as the main participant.

A main participant is an SME or a startup. Supporting participants are organizations supporting the main participant in the technical work needed to achieve the objectives defined for the experiment.

Applications are to be submitted by one or more main participants sharing a business case/challenge and optionally one or more supporting participants. Each consortium partner needs a clearly defined role.

The total number of consortium partners (main participants and supporting participants) is limited to five.

Only organizations established in an EU Member State or listed EEA countries and countries associated with the Digital Europe Programme where the agreement entered into force before 01/05/2024 are eligible to receive funding. Natural persons (individuals) are not eligible.

SME participation in the FFplus innovation studies for generative AI development and in the business experiments covered by this open call are mutually exclusive. Funding may only be provided for one type of action (Type 1 or Type 2 sub-project) for SMEs whose business challenge defines the business experiment or innovation study.

FFplus beneficiaries are ineligible to participate as either main or supporting participants.

The maximum duration of the experiments is 15 months, with a maximum funding budget of 200,000 EUR. The maximum funding per organization is 150,000 EUR. For supporting participants, the maximum funding applies to all business experiments, for all FFplus calls, in which they participate.

In principle, at least 50% of the funding applied for should be allocated to the main participants. Any deviations must be justified.

For supporting participants, only engineering/technical activities are eligible for funding. Activities such as business consultancy, marketing initiatives, administrative tasks, and other non-engineering/non-technical activities are ineligible.

The FFplus project cannot provide HPC computing resources itself, nor does it have any special allocation or preferred-priority access to the HPC systems of the EuroHPC JU. FFplus sub-projects are expected to use the HPC resources provided under the EuroHPC JU access schemes, which are provided free of charge. The use of nationally provisioned HPC resources is considered equivalent.

The EuroHPC JU access schemes are organized as calls for proposals with differing submission dates, available resource volumes, lengths of access, and specific opportunities for industrial users. Proposers should refer to the EuroHPC JU website for updated information about the access calls, organized in the areas of "supercomputers access" and "AI Factories access." HPC National Competence Centres may aid proposers with the selection of appropriate resources and access schemes and the related application process.

When justified, the use of 3rd party commercial HPC resources is permissible, but the corresponding costs need to be considered within the proposal budget. Similarly, the use of resources provided by an organization, such as an HPC center, included within the sub-project consortium as a supporting participant is permissible when suitably justified. The provision and cost of charged HPC resources by a supporting partner must be based on actual costs and not commercial rates. These costs have to be included in the experiment’s budget as “other direct cost” of the partner providing the HPC resources to the experiment consortium.

Budget modules available for experiments include:

Personnel: Personnel costs need to be commensurate with the work performed.

Equipment: Depreciation costs only. Only specialized equipment necessary for conducting the experiment is permitted. Costs for common-use equipment such as laptops, monitors, etc., are not eligible.

Travel: Travel must be justified in terms of the necessity for performance of the proposed experiment work plan.

HPC compute capacity: Compute Resources need to be justified. Ideally, EuroHPC systems will be used for the work. A decision not to apply for access to the EuroHPC systems should be duly justified.

Material: Costs for acquiring specialized SW licenses for conducting the experiment (licenses for general office software, for example, are not eligible). Costs for acquiring or using data sets or collections needed to conduct the experiment.

The experiments will receive support from the project with actions relating to interactions with the project and potential collaborations with other sub-projects. Direct support will be provided relating to gaining access to EuroHPC JU-provided computing resources and technical consultation relating to the effective execution of the experiment work plan.

The structure of the proposal Part B (and indicative length per section) should be as follows:

Summary (0.5 pages)

Industrial relevance, potential impact (including societal impact) and exploitation plans (3.5 pages)

Description of the work plan and concept, including the expected HPC computing needs (3 pages)

Quality of the consortium as a whole and of the individual proposers (2 pages)

Justification of costs and resources (1 page)

A management structure will be established for the successful proposals. The proposal will not need to contain a description of how the management of the experiment in the framework of the overall FFplus project will be achieved but should include tasks for the technical management of the experiment activities.

This call aims to address the uptake of HPC by SMEs to solve specific business challenges of SMEs that have had no prior use of, or experience with, HPC services. The resulting sub-projects will perform "business experiments" that should demonstrate to the broader European SME ecosystem that HPC uptake solves business challenges and leads to positive business impact (including but not limited to increased innovation potential and competitiveness) through the use and deployment of HPC-based computational methods (modelling and simulation, data analytics, AI, etc.). The key outputs are success stories that promote, communicate, and disseminate the business impact of HPC uptake to the SME ecosystem. The development of the innovation potential of the participating SMEs is also directly targeted.

The call targets high-quality experiments involving innovative, agile SMEs with work plans built around innovation targets arising from the use of advanced HPC services. Proposals are sought that address business challenges from European SMEs from varied application domains, whereby SMEs whose adoption of advanced HPC services will create the highest business impact will be prioritized. SMEs with an academic focus, for example, with business models around R&D services based on HPC software, or activities with a potential impact only in the long term, such as fundamental research, are not within the scope of the call.

FFplus seeks to promote a widening of the HPC user base amongst European SMEs and thus targets a broad geographical distribution of participants. SMEs based in countries with a previously low level of HPC adoption are encouraged to submit a proposal and may expect to be assisted by their national HPC Competence Centre.

This FFplus call is complementary to the open call for proposals for the Development of Generative AI Models (Identifier FFplus_Call-2-Type-2). SMEs (with the role of main participant) may only participate in one of the two types of sub-projects; i.e., participation is mutually exclusive. Since this call for business experiments targets SMEs with no prior experience with HPC services, a participation as main participant SME in a business experiment funded under the first call for proposals makes that SME ineligible for participation as main participant SME in a business experiment funded under this call; a participation as supporting participant would be dependent on total funding constraints.

The proposed business experiments are expected to:

Be fully aligned with the FFplus call objectives defined above.

Define the business challenge that needs to be addressed, justifying why this is a challenge and why HPC is needed to address it.

Present a vision of success, i.e., how addressing the business challenge using HPC will lead to positive business impact. If applicable, define the value propositions and the process of value creation.

Define specific objectives that must be achieved to successfully address the business challenge and the accompanying action plan. Furthermore, if necessary, involve the necessary parties required for the effective and efficient execution of the experiment and the demonstration of the impact on SME business challenges through the use of HPC systems or advanced HPC services. Appropriate technical management within an experiment is a required component. Key indicators include revenue generated over recent years and the existence of a customer base beyond the academic realm.

Define the resources needed to meet objectives and the associated costs. This potentially includes computing costs.

Declare any data protection issues that might impact its proposed work plan, define data/information protection mechanisms addressing these in the framework of European law, and ensure that the operation of the experiment adheres to these.

Support the FFplus project in the generation of publishable success stories – including in multi-media form – which discuss how the SME’s real-world problems were addressed and clearly identify the business benefits realized or obtained.

Be complementary to past Fortissimo experiments, i.e., avoid duplication of specific activities carried out in the prior Fortissimo, Fortissimo 2, and FF4EuroHPC projects or in the FFplus sub-projects from the first open call.

In the context of the Fortissimo Plus calls, complementarity of experiments is understood to mean activities that address new applications, services, business cases, industrial sectors, and market segments and the enhancement of the project’s ability to demonstrate the impact of the Fortissimo approach for a broad set of industrial users. Proposals that just extend past experiments are thus not considered complementary.

All submissions must be made by 17:00 Brussels local time on August 26th 2025. Proposal submission is exclusively in electronic form using the proposal submission tool accessible via the Fortissimo web-site: https://www.ffplus-project.eu/en/open-call/business-experiments/

The central component of proposal submission is the uploading of a spread-sheet containing administrative information and a PDF-document (whose size must not exceed 5.0 MB) compliant with the instructions on proposal structure given below.

Proposals must be submitted in English. Each proposal must comprise 2 parts: Part A (containing administrative information), Part B (containing the body of the proposal, the structure of which is explained below).

Part A of the proposal will be submitted as a spread-sheet containing a set of tables to provide administrative data, including a tabular list of proposal participants. The participant list should include for each participant the Participant Identification Code (PIC) issued by the European Commission and valid address, telephone number and email contact data.

To obtain a PIC, register at https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/how-to-participate/participant-register. Please note that having a PIC is not a requirement of the call.

Only requested information should be included in Part A, conform with the template spreadsheet provided. Additional extraneous information will be deleted before evaluation.

The main section of the proposal – Part B – must not exceed 10 pages in length (including any appendices, but excluding the Part B cover page). The Part B text should be no smaller than 11-point Arial font; which applies also to images inserted into the proposal that provide textual information. Proposals submitted with a Part B whose length (excluding the cover page) exceeds the 10-page limit will be rejected without further evaluation.

The criteria for evaluation will comprise:

Impact: industrial relevance (including potentially societal relevance), exploitation plans and alignment with the objectives of the call.

Excellence: Soundness of concept, business innovation, and quality of the work plan.

Quality of the consortium: as a whole and of the individual proposers including their ability to carry out the proposed work.

Resources: Effective and justified deployment of resources.

Criteria 1 to 4 will carry a score ranging from 0 to 5. Criterion 1 will have a weight of 2×, Criteria 2 to 4 a weight of 1× (leading to a maximum score of 25 points). A threshold score of 3 will apply to the first three criteria. In case of a tie in the overall score ranking, proposals are ranked based on the individual criteria scoring applying the following priority: Impact, Excellence, Quality of the Consortium, Resources, and finally total requested funding.

The evaluation of proposals will be done by independent, external experts using a consensus review process; which process will be supported by the FFplus beneficiaries coordinating the open call. Each proposal will be assigned two external expects with demonstrated competency in the field of the experiment proposal, that will, independently of one another, produce individual assessment reports. In a consensus session, a moderator works with the two individual evaluators to create a consensus assessment report, representing the consensus position of both experts. The consensus report is turned into an evaluation summary report that will be shared with the proposing consortium.

The individual assessment reports, consensus reports and evaluation summary reports are structured conform with the evaluation criteria listed above.

Adherence to the proposal format and structure described previously – and notably to the prescribed page limit – will allow the independent external evaluators to evaluate the proposal against all of the above-mentioned evaluation criteria. As explained earlier in this document, failure to adhere to the funding and eligibility restrictions and to the proposal format instructions will lead to immediate rejection of the proposal. The proposers will be provided with the results of the evaluation in the form of an evaluation summary report comprising the consolidated findings of the independent expert evaluators and a decision from the project on the result of the selection procedure. That decision is final and the project will not enter into discussions concerning the evaluation results, and no appeals process will be provided.

The successful proposal consortia selected for funding will be included as sub-projects on conclusion of a funding agreement between the University of Stuttgart (the FFplus project Coordinator) and the Partner(s) involved in the proposal. That funding agreement is provided on the project website and is non-negotiable and no changes or modifications are permitted. With the submission of a proposal, the proposer(s) acknowledge this.

In summary, this call for proposals under the FFplus project aims to encourage SMEs with no prior experience in High-Performance Computing (HPC) to adopt these technologies to solve their business challenges. The goal is to fund "business experiments" that demonstrate the positive impact of HPC on SME innovation, competitiveness, and overall business performance. The project provides financial support, technical assistance, and access to HPC resources to selected SMEs, enabling them to develop and implement innovative solutions using HPC. The call emphasizes the importance of creating success stories that can be shared with the broader SME ecosystem to promote the benefits of HPC adoption. The funding is provided as Financial Support to Third Parties (FSTP), covering 100% of eligible direct costs, with a maximum funding of 200,000 EUR per experiment and 150,000 EUR per organization. The call is highly competitive, seeking innovative and agile SMEs with clear work plans and a strong potential for business impact.

Eligible Applicant Types: The eligible applicant types are primarily SMEs and startups. The call specifically targets SMEs that have had no prior use of or experience with HPC services. Consortia can include supporting participants, which can be other types of organizations that support the main SME participant in the technical work. FFplus beneficiaries are ineligible to participate.

Funding Type: The funding type is a grant, specifically Financial Support for Third Parties (FSTP). Third parties will receive 100% funding of incurred, eligible direct costs necessary for the completion of experiment activities. No indirect costs or overheads will be funded.

Consortium Requirement: A consortium is required, consisting of one or more main participants (SMEs or startups) and optionally one or more supporting participants. The total number of consortium partners (main participants and supporting participants) is limited to five.

Beneficiary Scope (Geographic Eligibility): Organizations established in EU Member States or listed EEA countries and countries associated with the Digital Europe Programme where the agreement entered into force before 01/05/2024 are eligible to receive funding. Natural persons (individuals) are not eligible.

Target Sector: The target sector is broad, encompassing any sector where SMEs can benefit from the adoption of High-Performance Computing (HPC). This includes sectors utilizing modelling and simulation, data analytics, and AI. The call aims to address business challenges from European SMEs from varied application domains, prioritizing SMEs whose adoption of advanced HPC services will create the highest business impact. Sectors with an academic focus or activities with a potential impact only in the long term, such as fundamental research, are not within the scope of the call.

Mentioned Countries: EU Member States, EEA countries, and countries associated with the Digital Europe Programme (where the agreement entered into force before 01/05/2024).

Project Stage: The project stage is focused on business experiments, which implies a stage of development, validation, and demonstration of HPC solutions to solve specific business challenges of SMEs. The experiments should demonstrate the positive business impact of HPC uptake.

Funding Amount: The maximum funding budget for each experiment is 200,000 EUR. The maximum funding per organization is 150,000 EUR.

Application Type: The application type is an open call.

Nature of Support: Beneficiaries will receive money in the form of grants to cover 100% of eligible direct costs. They will also receive non-monetary services, including support from the project with actions relating to interactions with the project, potential collaborations with other sub-projects, direct support for gaining access to EuroHPC JU-provided computing resources, and technical consultation relating to the effective execution of the experiment work plan.

Application Stages: The application process appears to be a single-stage process, as indicated by the "single-stage" deadline model.

Success Rates: The success rates are not explicitly mentioned in the provided text.

Co-funding Requirement: Co-funding is not explicitly required, as the call provides 100% funding of eligible direct costs.

Summary:

This is the second call for proposals under the FFplus project, which aims to promote the uptake of High-Performance Computing (HPC) by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) across Europe. The call, funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, seeks to fund "business experiments" that demonstrate how HPC can solve specific business challenges and lead to positive business impact for SMEs that have little to no prior experience with HPC.

The call is open to consortia consisting of SMEs (or startups) as main participants, potentially supported by other organizations. The consortia must be based in EU Member States, EEA countries, or countries associated with the Digital Europe Programme. The selected experiments will receive up to 200,000 EUR in funding to cover 100% of their eligible direct costs, with a maximum of 150,000 EUR per organization. The experiments are expected to last up to 15 months.

The goal is to showcase success stories that highlight the benefits of HPC adoption for SMEs, encouraging wider use of these technologies. The call prioritizes innovative, agile SMEs with work plans built around innovation targets arising from the use of advanced HPC services. The experiments should address business challenges from European SMEs from varied application domains, prioritizing those with the highest potential business impact.

The FFplus project will provide support to the selected experiments, including assistance with accessing EuroHPC JU computing resources and technical consultation. The call is complementary to another open call for proposals for the Development of Generative AI Models, and SMEs can only participate in one of the two types of sub-projects.