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