EU-Wide Advantages and Opportunities for "Community Centres of Excellence" (HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-01)

1. Single Market Access (450 + million users)

• Pan-European User Base: Optimising scientific/industrial codes for EuroHPC systems instantly opens the door to every public and private organisation connected to the EuroHPC access programme in 27 Member States and Associated Countries.

• Commercial Exploitation: High-performing, energy-efficient codes can be licensed or provided as Software-as-a-Service to SMEs and corporates without having to re-adapt to different national standards – accelerating time-to-market for simulation- and AI-enabled products (e.g. digital twins, precision medicine, climate services).

• Market Validation at Scale: Early feedback loops from a diverse user community (health, energy, mobility, finance, security) de-risk further private investment and facilitate rapid product-market fit across the entire EU.

2. Cross-Border Collaboration & Knowledge Exchange

• Mandatory Consortia = Built-in Multinationality: Horizon Europe rules require at least three independent legal entities from three eligible countries, ensuring automatic cross-border teaming.

• Pooling of World-Class HPC Expertise: Combine domain scientists from, e.g., CEA (FR), BSC (ES), LRZ (DE) with algorithm specialists in widening countries (e.g., CY, BG) for inclusive capacity building.

• Mobility & Secondments: Budget can cover researcher exchanges, promoting hands-on code optimisation directly on the EU’s pre-exascale/exascale machines (LUMI-FI, Leonardo-IT, MareNostrum 5-ES, JUPITER-DE).

3. EU Policy Alignment & Strategic Fit

• European Green Deal: Energy-efficient algorithms cut data-centre power consumption, contributing to the 2030 climate target plan and the upcoming EU Energy Efficiency Directive obligations.

• Digital Europe & EU Chips Act: Co-design with European processor initiatives (EPI/Rhea) supports technological sovereignty; results feed into Digital Europe deployment actions.

• Health Union, Mission Cancer, Mission Climate: Accelerated simulations/AI for drug discovery, personalised oncology, or extreme-weather prediction directly underpin EU missions and Destination Earth (DestinE).

4. Regulatory Harmonisation Advantages

• Data Governance Act & European Research Data Space: A single legal framework for data sharing simplifies pan-EU access to reference data sets required for code benchmarking.

• AI Act Compliance by Design: Embedding trustworthy-AI requirements early avoids later re-engineering when deploying models or hybrid workflows throughout Europe.

• Open Science Mandate: Uniform IP and open-source licensing rules (e.g. EUPL, Apache 2.0) create legal clarity for all consortium and third-party users.

5. Access to the European Innovation Ecosystem

• Synergies with 33+ National HPC Competence Centres funded under EuroCC 2 guarantee outreach into local SMEs and research clusters.

• EIT & KIC Networks: Collaboration with EIT Digital/Health/Manufacturing offers acceleration, venture creation and skills pipelines for HPC-AI adopters.

• European University Alliances & ERICs: Ready-made channels for talent, joint curricula, and large domain data sets (e.g. ELIXIR for life sciences, EPOS for solid Earth).

6. Funding & Investment Synergies

• Stackable Financing: Combine the 50 % EU contribution with national co-funding, Digital Europe (DEP 2.3 Cloud-to-Edge), European Regional Development Fund (smart-specialisation HPC nodes), or IPCEI opportunities for microelectronics.

• Cascade Funding Opportunities: Future Horizon Europe CSA calls or Innovation Actions can provide vouchers to onboard additional SMEs/users to the CoE.

• Recovery & Resilience Facility (RRF): Many Member States earmark RRF funds for advanced computing; aligning roadmaps elevates TRL without extra equity dilution.

7. EU-Scale Deployment, Impact & Legacy

• Exascale Readiness: Codes optimised within the project become reference workloads for next-generation EuroHPC tenders, influencing hardware roadmaps Europe-wide.

• Standardised Training Curriculum: Coordinated with PRACE, EuroCC and upcoming European AI Factories, ensuring thousands of engineers and researchers acquire identical skills, boosting labour mobility.

• Inclusive Growth: Mandatory outreach to widening countries spreads HPC excellence, narrows the innovation divide, and fulfils cohesion objectives.

• Global Thought Leadership: Successful Community CoEs cement Europe’s role in setting de-facto standards for energy-aware exascale programming models and hybrid HPC-AI workflows.

8. Strategic Value versus National-Only Initiatives

• Economies of Scale: Shared access to billion-euro EuroHPC infrastructure would be impossible at purely national level.

• Avoidance of Fragmentation: Uniform KPIs and benchmarking methodologies reduce duplication and ensure that improvements in one domain (e.g. sparse solvers) propagate instantly across sectors.

• Enhanced Negotiating Power: A single European voice when interfacing with global hardware vendors (CPU/GPU/AI accelerators) results in better co-design terms and early silicon access.

9. Actionable Opportunities for Applicants

• Map your code base to one of the EU’s Grand Challenges (fusion energy, battery materials, cancer, cybersecurity) to show policy relevance.

• Integrate at least one widening-country HPC centre to maximise evaluation score on inclusiveness.

• Formalise links with the Support Centre for HPC-Powered AI Applications to tap their user pipeline.

• Embed measurable Green KPIs (e.g. GFlop/W, tonnes CO₂ saved) to ride the sustainability agenda.

• Plan a joint IP & open-source strategy leveraging harmonised EU licences to ease downstream adoption by industry.