EuroCC SME Accelerator Update - Fifth company joins SME Accelerator

Fathom is a digital transformation company. It designs and builds digital products at speed and scale for enterprises and public sector clients and is a “Select” partner of AWS (Amazon Web Services), the leading cloud platform. Fathom in partnership with NUI Galway has been working to develop a platform for predicting seaweed biomass powered by Earth Observation data. 

Fathom is interested in working with the European HPC Competence Centre at ICHEC to access expertise in the area of multi-data set processing, model enhancement and machine learning to  improve the accuracy of its existing model in addition to supporting further research to adapt the model for other seaweed species. 

Fathom joins four SMEs which signed up for the pilot phase of the SME Accelerator in May 2021. These companies represent a range of domains and technologies and will each develop a technical solutions model over a six month period with hands-on assistance from the European Competence Centre (EuroCC) at ICHEC. The five companies in the SME Accelerator are:

Ubotica Technologies provides technical solutions in the areas of Computer Vision and Machine Learning in embedded systems at the Edge.

Telenostic specialises in animal infection testing.

Nuritas combines AI and peptidomics to discover bioactive peptides with extraordinary health benefits. 

Evercam  provides time-lapse and project management solutions for construction projects.

ICHEC operates Ireland’s European Competency Centre (EuroCC) allowing Irish Academia and Industry foster HPC activities including access to supercomputing resources and skills nationally and internationally.

Background

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking allows the EU and EuroHPC participating countries (including Ireland) to coordinate their efforts and pool their resources with the objective of deploying in Europe world-class exascale supercomputers, able to perform more than one trillion (1018) operations per second and developing innovative supercomputing technologies and applications.  The EuroCC activities—with 33 member and associated countries on board—is coordinated by the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). The project aims to elevate the participating countries to a common high level in the fields of HPC, HPDA and artificial intelligence (AI). 

Objectives

The objectives of the SME accelerator are to:

• Increase the innovation potential of industry, and in particular of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), through the use of advanced HPC infrastructures, applications and services,
• Facilitate access to HPC-based infrastructures and services for a wide range of users of new and emerging data and compute-intensive applications and services,
• Foster wider innovation, for example by exchanging and promoting best practice use cases or application experiences amongst accelerator participants, and
• Provide an effective mechanism for inclusion of innovative, agile SMEs lowering the barriers for small actors to enter the market and exploit new business opportunities.

The SME Accelerator will allow SMEs to co-locate existing staff with the EuroCC over a 6-month period, allowing them access to HPC technical skills and infrastructure. The SME will be assisted to produce a technical solution model aimed at the optimisation of either an existing business process and modelling, or the development of new business processes and modelling. The assistance provide by the EuroCC will take the form of:

• One-to-one mentoring with highly skilled HPC staff employed in the EuroCC. A set number of hours will be allocated to each SME based on their technical solution model. It is expected that the SME will provide staff for at least the same amount of hours,
• Access to HPC training. This will included either participation in one of a number of regular HPC training courses offered by EuroCC and ICHEC or tailored training courses relevant to an awarded businesses own technical solution model and HPC skills level,
• Access to supercomputing infrastructure as well as, if necessary, a defined pathway to migrate from the national Tier-1 system to EuroHPC Tier-0 supercomputer.