More SMEs getting into SHAPE on the French Riviera

7 December 2016

SHAPE is a pan-European programme that promotes high performance computing adoption by SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises), and is supported as part of the PRACE initiative. So far SHAPE has helped 29 companies benefit from HPC.

This week saw the face-to-face meeting of Workpackage 7 of the PRACE project, hosted at Inria which is located at Sophia-Antipolis in the South of France, a beautiful (and warm!) setting for our meeting.

As coordinator of the task 7.1B SHAPE progamme, I was very pleased to announce at the meeting that four more SMEs will be able to start work with PRACE to gain access to HPC expertise and resources, expand their HPC experience and ultimately enhance their business. The four companies are:

  • Artelnics, a Spanish SME looking at using HPC in their Neural Designer
  • Milano Multiphysics s.r.l.s, an Italian company hoping to use HPC accelaration to improve prediction of erosion and corrision due to flowing liquid metals
  • Renuda UK Ltd, looking at optimising 2D flow for faster, better steam turbine design
  • Scienomics, a French SME looking at realistic modelling of complex, composite systems.

As always with SHAPE, it is encouraging to see the diverse range of subject areas and fields that the programme works with. It is expected that this new tranche of projects will start in January 2017.

As part of the meeting, we had talks from three current SHAPE projects:

  • ACOBIOM, a French SME looking at RNA sequencing for discovering biomarkers, in the field of diagnosis and therapuetic medicines. The work with SHAPE has enabled it to incorporate and analyse huge genetic datasets from multiple sources in a timely manner.
  • AmpliSIM, an SME offering a web-based service for air quality simulations. SHAPE is helping them use an HPC infrastructure to ensure that the simulations can be delivered in better than real time, and make use of Big Data statistical tools.
  • Pharmacelera, a Spanish company looking at drug discovery, who are gaining assistance in parallelising their code and porting it to new architectures.

Next phase

SHAPE will continue in the next phase of PRACE (5IP), and the plan is to have six-monthly calls (the next opens in January), giving ample opportunity for SMEs to investigate what HPC can do for their business.

To find out more about the project, see the SHAPE website or contact me.