The European Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications
13 June 2022
The European Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications (EXCELLERAT) came to the end of its first phase in May 2022. The Centre was established to be a single point of access for expertise on how engineering workflows can benefit from data management, data analytics, visualisation, simulation-driven design and Co-design with high-performance computing (HPC).
The goal of EXCELLERAT is to enable the European engineering industry to advance towards Exascale technologies and to create a single entry point to services and knowledge for all stakeholders (industrial end users, ISVs, technology providers, HPC providers, academics, code developers, engineering experts) of HPC for engineering. In order to achieve this goal, EXCELLERAT brings together key players from industry, research and HPC to provide all necessary services.
Engineering is one of the key industrial areas that can benefit from the use of HPC, and it remains one the most important sectors in Europe. The European engineering supply chain eco-system consists of over 100,000 companies and more than 10 million jobs. Engineering is seen as one of the industry areas in which Exascale computing can have the most significant impact.
EXCELLERAT brings together 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.
Potential Exascale applications
The core of EXCELLERAT’s work is around six reference applications, which provide a focus for its work. The six applications have been chosen for their potential as Exascale applications and for their industrial relevance. By studying these applications and how they can be adapted for Exascale, the CoE partners have learned valuable lessons and developed new approaches and technologies that can be applied to other software.
The CoE has been running an outreach programme to encourage the wider industrial engineering community to take up the results of the Centre’s work.
Service portal
An important activity in EXCELLERAT is the development of a service portal through which external users can benefit from the tools, expertise and training that EXCELLERAT offers. The portal (https://services.excellerat.eu/) is aimed at developers and engineers and is important for making the CoE sustainable.
The CoE plans to continue under the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/). Because of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, EPCC will be unable to take any further part in EXCELLERAT. However, EPCC remains committed to the development of Exascale computing, and fostering and supporting its take-up by industry.
We extend our best wishes for the future to our many friends and colleagues in EXCELLERAT.
