ENACT develops cutting-edge techniques and technology solutions to realise a Cognitive Computing Continuum (CCC) that can address the needs for optimal (edge and Cloud) resource management and dynamic scaling, elasticity, and portability of hyper-distributed data-intensive applications. At infrastructure level, the project brings visibility to distributed edge and Cloud resources by developing Dynamic Graph Models capable of capturing and visualising the real-time and historic status information, connectivity types, dependencies, energy consumption etc. from diverse edge and Cloud resources. The graph models are used by AI (Graph Neural Networks - GNN) models and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents to suggest the optimal deployment configurations for hyper distributed applications considering their specific needs. The AI (GNN and DRL) models are packaged as an intelligent decision-making engine that can replace the scheduling component of open-source solutions such as KubeEdge. This will enable real-time and predictive management of distributed infrastructure and applications. To take full advantage of the potential (compute, storage, energy efficiency etc) opportunities in the CCC, ENACT will develop an innovative Application Programming Model (APM). The APM will support the development of distributed platform agnostic applications, capable of self-determining their optimal deployment and optimal execution configurations while taking advantage of diverse resources in the CCC. An SDK to develop APM-based distributed applications will be developed. Moreover, services for automatic (zero-touch provisioning-based) resource configuration and (telemetry) data collections are developed to help design and update dynamic graph models. ENACT CCC solutions will be validated in 3 use-cases with challenging resource and application requirements. International collaboration is planned as Japan Productivity Center has committed to support with knowledge sharing.

Fortissimo 2 will drive the uptake of advanced modelling, simulation and data analytics by European engineering and manufacturing SMEs and mid-caps. Such an uptake will deliver improved design processes, better products and services, and improved competitiveness. For the European Union as a whole this means improved employment opportunities and economic growth. The importance of advanced ICT to the competitiveness of both large and small companies in the engineering and manufacturing domain is well established. Despite early successes in this area, there are still many barriers to the uptake of such solutions, not least of which are the initial cost and complexity of adoption, particularly in the context of challenging trading conditions. This proposal targets the ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) action line (Phase 2) and builds on Phase 1 of that initiative. Phase 2 addresses the adoption of next generation ICT advances in the manufacturing domain. At the core of Fortissimo 2 are three tranches of Application Experiments (~35 in total). An initial set is included in this proposal and two further sets will be obtained through Open Calls for proposals. These experiments will be driven by the requirements of first-time users (predominately SMEs) and will bring together actors from across the value chain, from cycle providers to domain experts via the Fortissimo Marketplace. This will enable innovative solutions to manufacturing challenges, leading to new and improved design processes, products and services. A key feature of Fortissimo 2 will be the adaption of the Marketplace to meet the needs of end-users. It will offer a responsive and reliable service to companies which want to access HPC and Big resources and expertise. Fortissimo 2 initially involves 732 months of effort, a total cost of €11.1m and EC funding of €10m over a duration of three years, commensurate with achieving its ambitious goals.

Engineering applications will be among the first exploiting exascale, not only in academia but also industry. In fact, the industrial engineering field is *the* industrial field with the highest exascale potential, thus EXCELLERAT brings together the necessary European expertise to establish a Centre of Excellence in Engineering with a broad service portfolio, paving the way for the evolution towards EXASCALE. All within the frame of the European HPC Strategy realization just pushed forward with the activities on the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. To fulfil its mission, EXCELLERAT will base on six carefully chosen reference applications (Nek5000, Alya, AVBP, Fluidity (deprecated, replaced with TPLS), FEniCS, Flucs), which were analysed on their potential to support the aim to achieve EXASCALE performance in HPC for Engineering and thus to become candidates to be executed on the Exascale Demonstrators, Pre-Exascale Systems and Exascale Machines . All the facets of such a centre are addressed by EXCELLERAT, from "n

EXCELLERAT P2 continues the fruitful partnership of Europe’s leading HPC centres, application specialists and supporting partners who have worked with and offered their expertise and knowledge to engineering companies and researchers from across industry and academia for the past three decades. A key strength of EXCELLERAT P2 is that it will build on the achievements of EXCELLERAT P1, including the available service portal as a baseline for impact and awareness creation. Furthermore, the critical mass, knowledge and expertise of Europe is re-united and extended by additional experts, to continue the Centre of Excellence, which will span the whole domain of engineering – ensuring that innovations produced are applicable to other engineering challenges, that co-design is handled properly, that success stories are created and distributed, all in all to support best the European HPC strategy. EXCELLERAT P2 will base its evolution and developments on six chosen use cases, requiring the full range of HPC usage profiles, from small scale capacity type applications, all the way to hero run type large scale applications. The advancements the use cases as well as further applications will make beyond the state of the art, as well as the results, which will be derived by the execution of the use cases and the further applications, will have a clear impact in Europe. EXCELLERAT P2 (and the brand) strives to show the contribution of HPC, HPDA and AI in engineering to a low-carbon, more environmentally friendly and socially responsible product development and manufacturing as well as the mobility and energy sector. The holistic view of EXCELLERAT P2 to the usage of HPC (and HPDA and AI) is needed, if engineering applications shall be supported to increase the European competitiveness. Thus, the developments done in EXCELLERAT P2 will increase the European competitiveness in HPC-applications, hardware-design and HPC-service provisioning to a new level.

The overall objective of the Next Generation I/O Project (NEXTGenIO) is to design and prototype a new, scalable, high-performance, energy efficient computing platform designed to address the challenge of delivering scalable I/O performance to applications at the Exascale. It will achieve this using highly innovative, non-volatile, dual in-line memory modules (NV-DIMMs). These hardware and systemware developments will be coupled to a co-design approach driven by the needs of some of today’s most demanding HPC applications. By meeting this overall objective, NEXTGenIO will solve a key part of the Exascale challenge and enable HPC and Big Data applications to overcome the limitations of today’s HPC I/O subsystems. Today most high-end HPC systems employ data storage separate from the main system and the I/O subsystem often struggles to deal with the degree of parallelism present. As we move into the domain of extreme parallelism at the Exascale we need to address I/O if such systems are to deliver appropriate performance and efficiency for their application user communities. The NEXTGenIO project will explore the use of NV-DIMMs and associated systemware developments through a co-design process with three ‘end-user’ partners: a high-end academic HPC service provider, a numerical weather forecasting service provider and a commercial on-demand HPC service provider. These partners will develop a set of I/O workload simulators to allow quantitative improvements in I/O performance to be directly measured on the new system in a variety of research configurations. Systemware software developed in the project will include performance analysis tools, improved job schedulers that take into account data locality and energy efficiency, optimised programming models, and APIs and drivers for optimal use of the new I/O hierarchy. The project will deliver immediately exploitable hardware and software results and show how to deliver high performance I/O at the Exascale.