CYBELE generates innovation and create value in the domain of agri-food, and its verticals in the sub-domains of PA and PLF in specific, as demonstrated by the real-life industrial cases to be supported, empowering capacity building within the industrial and research community. Since agriculture is a high volume business with low operational efficiency, CYBELE aspires at demonstrating how the convergence of HPC, Big Data, Cloud Computing and the IoT can revolutionize farming, reduce scarcity and increase food supply, bringing social, economic, and environmental benefits. CYBELE intends to safeguard that stakeholders have integrated, unmediated access to a vast amount of large scale datasets of diverse types from a variety of sources, and they are capable of generating value and extracting insights, by providing secure and unmediated access to large-scale HPC infrastructures supporting data discovery, processing, combination and visualization services, solving challenges modelled as mathematical algorithms requiring high computing power. CYBELE develops large scale HPC-enabled test beds and delivers a distributed big data management architecture and a data management strategy providing 1) integrated, unmediated access to large scale datasets of diverse types from a multitude of distributed data sources, 2) a data and service driven virtual HPC-enabled environment supporting the execution of multi-parametric agri-food related impact model experiments, optimizing the features of processing large scale datasets and 3) a bouquet of domain specific and generic services on top of the virtual research environment facilitating the elicitation of knowledge from big agri-food related data, addressing the issue of increasing responsiveness and empowering automation-assisted decision making, empowering the stakeholders to use resources in a more environmentally responsible manner, improve sourcing decisions, and implement circular-economy solutions in the food chain.

The HPC Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe (DARE) will invigorate the continent’s High Performance Computing ecosystem by bringing together the technology producers and consumers, developing a RISC-V ecosystem that supports the current and future computing needs, while at the same time enabling European Digital Autonomy. DARE takes a customer-first approach (HPC Centres & Industry) to guide the full stack research and development. DARE leverages a co-design software/hardware approach based on critical HPC applications identified by partners from research, academia, and industry to forge the resulting computing solutions. These computing solutions range from general purpose processors to several accelerators, all utilizing the RISC-V ecosystem and emerging chiplet ecosystem to reduce costs and enable scale. The DARE program defines the full lifecycle from requirements to deployment, with the computing solutions validated by hosting entities, providing the path for European technology from prototype to production systems. The six year time horizon is split into two phases, enabling a DARE plan of action and set of roadmaps to provide the essential ingredients to develop and procure EU Supercomputers in the third phase. DARE defines SMART KPIs for the hardware and software developments in each phase, which act as gateways to unlock the next phase of development. The DARE HPC roadmaps (a living document) are used by the DARE Collaboration Council to maximize exploitation and spillover across all European RISC-V projects. DARE addresses the European HPC market failure by including partners with different levels of HPC maturity with the goal of growing a vibrant European HPC supply chain. DARE Consortium partners have been selected based on the ability to contribute to the DARE value chain, from HPC Users, helping to define all the requirements, to all parts of the hardware development, software development, system integration and subsequent commercialization.

Advancing education and training in High Performance Computing (HPC) and its applicability to HPDA and AI is essential for strengthening the world-class European HPC ecosystem. It is of primary importance to ensure the digital transformation and the sustainability of high-priority economic sectors. Missing educated and skilled professionals in HPC/HPDA/AI could prevent Europe from creating socio-economic value with HPC. The Hpc EuRopean ConsortiUm Leading Education activities (HERCULES) aims to develop a new and innovative European Master programme focusing on high performance solutions to address these issues. The master programme aims at catalysing various aspects of the HPC ecosystem and its applications into different scientific and industrial domains. HERCULES brings together major players in HPC education in Europe and mobilises them to unify existing programs into a common European curriculum. It leverages experience from various European countries and HPC communities to generate European added value beyond the potential of any single university. HERCULES emphasizes on collaboration across Europe with innovative teaching paradigms including co-teaching and the cooperative development of new content relying on the best specialists in HPC education in Europe. Employers, researchers, HPC specialists, supercomputing centres, CoEs and technology providers will constitute a workforce towards this master in HPC pilot programme. This pilot will provide a base for further national and pan-European educational programmes in HPC all over Europe and our lessons learned and the material development will accelerate the uptake of HPC in academia and industry. The creation of a European network of HPC specialists will catalyse transfers and mutual support between students, teachers and industrial experts. A particular focus on mobility of students and teachers will enable students to rapidly gain experience through internships and exposure to European supercomputing centres

Large scale deployment of renewable energy (RE) is key to comply with the GHG emissions reduction set by the COP21 agreement. Despite cost competitive in many settings, RE diffusion remains limited largely due to its variability. This works as a major barrier to RE’s integration in electricity networks as knowledge of power output and demand forecasting beyond a few days remains poor. To help solve this problem, S2S4E will offer an innovative service to improve RE variability management by developing new research methods exploring the frontiers of weather conditions for future weeks and months. The main output of S2S4E will be a user co-designed Decision Support Tool (DST) that for the first time integrates sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) climate predictions with RE production and electricity demand. To support the dissemination of climate services, a pilot of the DST will be developed in two steps. The first will draw on historical case studies pointed as relevant by energy companies - e.g. periods with an unusual climate behaviour affecting the energy market. The second step will improve probabilistic S2S real-time forecasts built up into the DST and assess their performances in real life decision-making in these companies. This process will be co-designed with consortium’s partners which represent different needs and interests in terms of regions, RE sources (wind, solar and hydro) and electricity demand. Besides the partners, S2S4E will engage other users from the energy sector as well as other business areas and research communities to further explore DST application and impact. As a result, DST will enable RE producers and providers, electricity network managers and policy makers to design better informed S2S strategies able to improve RE integration, business profitability, electricity system management, and GHG emissions’ reduction. The long-term objective is to make the European energy sector more resilient to climate variability and extreme events.