Date: May 5, 2020

Boosting HPC innovation with Business Prototyping Projects

One of the main goals of Eurolab4HPC is to promote entrepreneurship by building an innovation pipeline from general purpose entrepreneurial training, business prototyping, business plan development and helping with funding. During these last 2 project years, Eurolab4HPC has supported 9 business prototyping projects (BPP) for a total of €135 000.

The first call for business prototyping projects, launched in 2018 resulted in the following three BPP's:

  • USER - Urgent Simulation of Earthquakes for Resilience Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) Josep de La Puente, Jose María Cela and Alejandro Mart The project USER has found that there may be real market opportunities available for earthquake modelling using HPC. In particular, single-event (Le. earthquake) detailed analysis can benefit from the technology. Precedents are found of usage of HPC in disaster resilience, for example for the case of tropical cyclones, hence further validating the assumption of economic impact of the simulations. Particular niches include that of parametric insurance, if simulations are used to model losses or consulting, to analyse details about the resilience of particular infrastructures. International agencies might be one of the primary vehicles for funding of related initiatives. There appears to be a clear economic potential to the technology, albeit the particular target application remains unclear until further developments take place. Nevertheless, further technological maturity is still needed, as well as having early technology adopters, as could be civil protection institutions.

  • ATOMSIM: Atomistic simulations for materials design Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) Monica de Mier, Stephan Mohr and Gerhard Goldbeck
    The project has taken the next step, and we are proud to present to you the new start-up Nextmol which sprouted from the successful ATOMSIM project. Read more => ATOMSIM

  • PREDICT: Prediction of HPC failures in the field Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) Petar Radojkovic, Paul Carpenter and Mario Nemirovsky
    The EuroLab4HPC BPP has helped us to test various hypothesis in the initial business model, leading to an evolution of the business model during the project.

The second call for business prototyping projects in 2019 has granted another three applications:

  • DDRNoC: Dual Data Rate Network-on-chip Chalmers Ahsen Ejaz, Ioannis Sourdis and Wei Jan Wang

  • Parallelware Analyzer: Static code analysis for concurrency and parallelism Appentra Solutions Manuel Arenaz, Javier Novo and Carlos Cobas

  • BarbequeRTRM: Barbeque Runtime Resource Manager Politecnico di Milano Giuseppe Massari, Federico Reghenzani and William Fornaciari

The Special call for business prototyping projects offered also the opportunity to present your business plan to several VC's during the HiPEAC20 conference in Bologna. These three applications were granted:

  • PASIM: Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)- Alfonso Santiago, Mariano Vázquez and Christopher Morton

  • GreenHLS: Politecnico di Milano - Luca Cremona, Davide Zoni and William Fornaciari

  • PETO4HPDA: University of Manchester- Andy Nisbet, Mikel Lujan and John Goodacre

The results of the project have been captured as a lean business model canvas that has identified promising potential customer value propositions, and indicative venture capital investment requirements for proceeding to a startup company. PETO4HPDA has identified and is currently investigating how its technological innovation may benefit performance optimisation of representative benchmarks from a potential early adopter customer involved in B2B support for e-commerce.