Consortium

Atos is a European IT services corporation with its headquarters in Bezons, France and offices worldwide. It specialises in hi-tech transactional services, unified communications, cloud, big data and cybersecurity services. Atos operates worldwide under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting, Atos Healthcare, Atos Worldgrid, Bull, Canopy, Unify and Worldline.

The company was formed in 1997 through a merger of two French IT companies; and combined with the Dutch-based company Origin B.V. in 2000 to become Atos Origin. It subsequently acquired KPMG Consulting in 2002 and SchlumbergerSema in 2004.

In 2010 Atos Origin announced the buyout of Siemens IT Solutions and Services and finalized the acquisition in July 2011. Afterwards, the company name reverted to Atos.

In April 2018, Atos partnered with Google Cloud to help offer secure artificial intelligence solutions.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) was established in 2005 and is the Spanish national supercomputing facility and a hosting member of the PRACE distributed supercomputing infrastructure. The Center houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC was a pioneer in combining HPC service provision, and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof. The centre fosters multidisciplinary scientific collaboration and innovation and currently has over 500 staff from 41 countries. In 2011, BSC was one of only eight Spanish research centres recognized by the national government as a “Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence”.

BSC has collaborated with industry since its creation, and has participated in projects with companies such as ARM, Bull and Airbus as well as numerous SMEs. BSC also participates in various bilateral joint research centres with companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Lenovo, NVIDIA and Spanish oil company Repsol. The center has been extremely active in the EC Framework Programmes and has participated in over one hundred and sixty projects funded by them. BSC is a founding member of HiPEAC, the ETP4HPC and participates in the most relevant international road mapping and discussion forums and has strong links to Latin America. Education and Training is a priority for the centre and many of BSCs researchers are also university lecturers. BSC offers courses as a PRACE Advanced Training Centre, and through the Spanish national supercomputing network, among others.

The Computer Sciences Department focuses on building upon currently available hardware and software technologies and adapting these technologies to make efficient use of supercomputing infrastructures. The department proposes novel architectures for processors and memory hierarchy and develops programming models and innovative implementation approaches for these models as well as tools for performance analysis and prediction.

Infineon Technologies AG is a world leader in semiconductors. Infineon offers products and system solutions addressing three central challenges to modern society: energy efficiency, mobility, and security. In the 2016 fiscal year (ending September 30), the company reported sales of Euro 6,473 billion with more than 36.000 employees worldwide.  The company´s product range includes power semiconductors, discrete semiconductors, silicon sensors and optoelectronic semiconductors as well as microcontrollers and Multi-Cores. Infineon is the No. 2 chip supplier to the automotive industry, No.1 supplier for power semiconductors and No.1 for smart card ICs too. Infineon has a strong manufacturing base in Germany, Europe and worldwide. Manufacturing sites in Germany comprise a 300mm manufacturing base in Dresden and a 200mm manufacturing site in Regensburg, both for logic products, microcontrollers and power semiconductors, and in addition in Warstein a production site for power electronics. The factory in Regensburg also contains a pilot production line for packaging.

Founded in 2016, SemiDynamics is a Fabless semiconductor company specialized in microprocessor architecture and design, interconnection networks and memory controllers, with a special focus on low power operation and high-performance pipelining. SemiDynamics is currently developing a high-performance microprocessor for the 7nm technology node. The company is self-funded through external commercial contracts. The development team at SemiDynamics has many years of microprocessor and ASIC development with many industry veterans that have successfully taped-out chips in many different technologies. SemiDynamics has extensive experience in vector unit design, high-speed cache design, coherency protocols, machine learning specialized instructions, high bandwidth memory controllers. Further, SemiDynamics has capabilities in both front-end and back-end design, covering the design cycle from architecture, through RTL implementation, verification, synthesis and place&route.

CEA is a French Research and Technology Organisation, with more than 16 000 staff members, focusing on low-carbon energies, defense and global security, information technologies and health technologies, as well as fundamental research. CEA is a major player all along the advanced computing and HPC value chain, from technologies to usages.

Computing technologies:

CEA Tech, CEA LETI, CEA LIST divisions are active in the development of silicon technology, architecture of processors, system integration, cyberphysical systems, artificial intelligence hardware and software; CEA/DAM, CEA/DRF, CEA/DEN divisions are active in HPC system integration, software environments, co-design of supercomputers, programming tools and algorithms for supercomputing – including parallel file systems and massive storage, numerical algorithms, meshing and visualisation.

Supercomputing infrastructures:

CEA operates world-class computing resources and services for research (TGCC), industry (CCRT), defence (TERA), which are all three petascale facilities, and participates in R&D in HPC and in co-design of supercomputers with leading technology providers.

Supercomputing applications:

CEA divisions make intensive usage of HPC in a wide diversity of areas corresponding to its aforementioned missions. CEA has co-funded Maison de la Simulation with CNRS, INRIA and two Paris region universities, a joint research lab in numerical simulation and HPC. CEA has established many strong international cooperations in advanced computing; the most salient are with Intel (Exascale; core technologies), Bull-Atos (co-design of supercomputers), Japan/RIKEN, US/DOE, Germany/Helmholtz.

Chalmers, a world-renowned technical university founded in 1829, has internationally recognized research in the areas of life sciences, materials science, information technology, micro- and nanotechnology, environmental sciences and energy with about 14000 people, including 2500 employees, carried out in 13 academic departments.  Chalmers has been involved in EU funded research projects since 1989 and is on a continuous basis involved in approximately 160 projects within different EU programmes, mainly the Framework Programmes. The annual EU funding (2016) for research is 23 M€. The Chalmers parts within FP7 have a contract value of 121 M€. Chalmers is the beneficiary in 270 projects in FP7, and the coordinator or single beneficiary of 52 of these contracts. Out of these contracts, Chalmers is the host for 17 ERC grants. As for Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions, Chalmers is the beneficiary in 31 MCA projects in FP7: 13 ITNs (coordinator for 2); 3 Intra-European Fellowships; 10 Career Integration Grants; 3 IRSES; 2 IAPPs. In Horizon 2020 Chalmers is participating in 93 projects with a contract value of 52 M€, whereof 5 ERC grants, 21 MSCA grants (10 ITNs) and 22 projects in the Transport challenge. Chalmers has participated in more than 700 Framework Programme projects and is the coordinator of 20 Horizon 2020 projects including the Graphene Flagship.

Chalmers’s involvement in this major initiative includes a prominent research division in The Computer Science and Engineering Department. This department is internationally strong in a wide range of areas critical for high-performance computing, including algorithms, formal methods, software engineering, programming languages, distributed systems, security, dependable computing, computer architecture, and VLSI design. It engages more than 150 research faculty members and PhD students.  Chalmers also brings expertise in business innovation through several other academic constellations including Chalmers Center for Business Innovation, Chalmers Ventures and the School of Entrepreneurship.   Chalmers will be involved in the proposal through the Division of Computer Engineering under the leadership of our prominent research leader in computer architecture, Professor Per Stenstrom. This division engages about 30 researchers and PhD students in computer architecture and VLSI design.

Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich) has currently 19,800 students from over 120 countries, including 4,000 doctoral students. More than 500 professors currently teach and conduct research in engineering, architecture, mathematics, natural sciences, system-oriented sciences, and management and social sciences. ETH Zürich regularly appears at the top of international rankings as one of the best universities in the world (top 10 in QS and THE rankings, top 20 in ARWU rankings and first university in a non-English speaking country for all these rankings). Twenty-one Nobel Laureates have studied, taught or conducted research at ETH Zürich. ETH Zürich is organised in 16 departments out of which the Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) and the Computer Science (D-INFK) will be directly involved in this project.  Both departments are ranked in the top 10 worldwide.

The Integrated Systems Laboratory (IIS) of D-ITET focuses on the design of energy-efficient, high-performance integrated circuits for computing systems covering a wide range of applications from embedded systems in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain to high performance computing systems. The IIS employs more than 100 researchers and it has 30 years of experience in the design and test of efficient computing systems based on different targets including latest integrated circuit (IC) technologies. More than 440 ICs were designed and tested at the IIS (see http://asic.ethz.ch).  IIS has established strategic agreements with major semiconductor companies, such as STMicroelectronics and Globalfoundries for direct access to the most advanced digital IC technologies.  The IIS has received direct funding from major companies in the computing field, such as Intel, Samsung, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, NXP, STmicroelectronics. The IIS has recently established itself as one of the leaders in the open hardware development, and is a founding member of the RISC-V foundation, maintains strong connections to the FOSSI (Free and Open Source Silicon) foundation. Its flagship project, the parallel ultra-low power platform (PULP) is a co-development of IIS and the University of Bologna and allows researchers access to a state-of-the-art processor cores based on the open RISC-V ISA for advanced computing ad application acceleration.

The Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory (SPCL) of the D-INFK performs research in all areas of scalable computing under the leadership of Prof. Hoefler. The research areas include scalable high-performance networks and protocols, middleware, operating system and runtime systems, parallel programming languages, support, and constructs, storage, and scalable data access.  The SPCL group has several active research projects, many in collaboration with industry, other academic institutions, and high-performance computing centres world-wide.

The Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) is a unit of ETH Zürich that operates extreme-scale computing and data services as an openly accessible research infrastructure (RI). The RI is available to all researchers in Europe through a transparent peer review process. CSCS currently operates the largest Tier-0 system in PRACE, which, at the time of this writing (September 2017), is the fastest supercomputer outside of China. The centre also operates the operational weather forecasting system for MeteoSwiss and has developed considerable experience in co-designing energy efficient computing systems for weather and climate simulations. As a result of this work, CSCS was the first site that put a GPU-based system into operation for weather forecasting in fall 2015. CSCS is one of the first adopters of hybrid, accelerated systems and has several years of operational experience with this class of supercomputing systems.

FORTH is a major research centre in Greece; it has 1400 people, it has excelled in all national evaluations so far, and it is internationally acknowledged for its excellence in basic and applied research, in developing applications and products, and in providing services. The Institute of Computer Science (ICS) of FORTH, with its 35-year history, has 450 people in 8 Laboratories. Contributions to this project will come from the Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems (CARV) Laboratory of FORTH-ICS, with its 80 people and its 32-year history that includes the design, implementation, and test of dozens of innovative FPGA, ASIC, board, and System Software prototypes; this expertise recently attracted a major R&D Lab of KALEAO Ltd. (www.kaleao.com) to the Science & Technology Park of Crete, bringing close collaboration between FORTH and this highly innovative start-up company.

In Processor Design, Prof. Manolis Katevenis has made central contributions in RISC architectures for VLSI, 36 years ago. Subsequently, at FORTH, his team has made pioneering contributions to Scalable Architectures: in the Telegraphos project (1993-95), workstation clustering prototypes were designed and built, including processor-network interfaces for protected, user-level zero-copy, communication and remote-queue based synchronization.  In Interconnection Networks, FORTH pioneered, since 1986, per-flow backpressure and congestion tolerance, weighted round-robin scheduling and fair queuing, and more. In High Performance Computing, within the ExaNeSt FETHPC project that it coordinates, and in cooperation with the EuroEXA and ExaNoDe projects to which it participates, FORTH is building an ARMv8 prototype with UNIMEM global address space, hundreds of nodes, an innovative interconnect, and a novel storage architecture.  Since 2013, FORTH makes also key contributions in the area of dense, low-power ARM servers (EuroServer project).

In Parallel Programming and Systems Software, FORTH has built a set of parallelizing compilers and static analyses targeting task-parallel programming models (OmpSs, Cilk, Myrmics, etc.), execution engines for task-parallel and streaming/dataflow computations on a wide set of hardware architectures (x86, Xeon Phi, SCC, Cell BE, FPGAs, etc.), NUMA and DSM memory allocators, and a Java virtual machine for the Formic 512-core distributed-memory processor. In Storage and I/O systems, FORTH-ICS has worked on SSD caching, storage controller efficiency, scalability of the I/O path in modern servers, performance isolation in scalable multicore servers, distributed tier-0 storage for fast storage devices, and efficient higher-level abstractions for storage access. Part of this work in CARV has been recently successfully commercialized, through a large international company. FORTH is actively collaborating with Industry on real systems and products due to its expertise and track record on addressing problems in real systems.

GENCI is the French agency in charge of the coordination and implementation of French national scientific policy concerning development of HPC and storage/data treatment of massive data; this public large-scale Research Infrastructure defines and purchases supercomputers and related equipment in HPC and data. Its main mission is to deliver high performance computing hours to scientific academic and industrial labs involved in open research and to help SMEs to get awareness of HPC potential for socio-economic growth.

GENCI is the French representative into PRACE aisbl Council and one of the 5 hosting members together with Germany, Italy, Span and Switzerland. With this expertise GENCI will contribute to the task Link to the EU strategy of the Global Stream. GENCI is also strongly involved in the definition of European Data Infrastructure and supports French government preparatory activity in EuroHPC initiative implementation.

Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) is the largest and most reputed school of Engineering, Science and Technology in Portugal, and a part of Universidade de Lisboa. Since its creation in 1911, IST’s mission is to contribute to the development of society by providing top quality higher education, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as developing Research, Development and Innovation (RD&I) activities to allow it to provide teaching in line with the highest international standards.

Research at IST is organised in Centres and Institutes that pursue challenging research programmes with a strong social impact in the fields of Architecture, Engineering, Science and Technology. The 20 Centres and Institutes of IST, working in several areas of scientific knowledge, are recognised at national and international levels and address a multidisciplinary research in an international and multicultural atmosphere. The area of Information and Communication Technologies, with 5 Research Centres involved, covers topics such as Computing, Computer Engineering, Computer Systems, Systems and Robotics and Telecommunications.

IST is involved with some of the most prestigious RD&I and technology transfer institutions in Europe, with remarkable impact internationally in many scientific and technological domains. Internationalization has been defined as a key strategic goal over the past few years with increasing number of international students and staff as well as an increasing participation in international academic networks and establishment of several double degree programs in both MSc and PhD levels. Some figure of IST Research and Development: 20 R&D Centres and Institutes; 8 Associate Laboratories; 2.174 Scientific publications in ISI Web of Science; 1.302 total of IST’s faculty and researchers, 11 New patent applications in 2016.

The Forschungszentrum Jülich (JUELICH) – a member of the Helmholtz Association – is one of the largest research centres in Europe. It pursues cutting-edge interdisciplinary research addressing the challenges facing society in the fields of health, energy and the environment, and information technologies. JUELICH is organised in various research institutions, each one addressing a specifically defined scientific goal or societal challenge.

One of them is the Institute for Advance Simulations (IAS), to which the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) belongs. JSC has over 30 years expertise in providing supercomputer services to national and international user communities. It undertakes research and development in HPC architectures, performance analysis, HPC software and tools, and grid computing. JSC has established three jointly operated laboratories to develop and test new promising HPC architectures and prototypes to enter the Exascale era, as well as to foster co-design strategies: the Exascale Innovation Centre – a cooperation with IBM Böblingen – the ExaCluster Laboratory – a cooperation with Intel GmbH and ParTec GmbH – and the NVIDIA Application Lab – a cooperation with NVIDIA. With these, JSC gets access to the newest HPC products before they are even available in the market and contributes to their evolution as product through codesign input based on its application portfolio. JUELICH is also part of the ParaStation Consortium, responsible for the development of the ParaStation cluster management software. Last, but not least, JSC is one of the three national supercomputing centres in Germany as part of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), which operates some of the highest performance computing systems in Europe.

Another institute is the Central Institute of Engineering, Electronics and Analytics (ZEA) to which the Electronic Systems (ZEA-2) institute as a scientific and technical institute belongs. It carries out research and development projects in cooperation with the institutes at Forschungszentrum Jülich and with external partners. Work focuses on developing electronic and information technology system solutions for complex topics in: sensor and detector technology; signal and data processing; measurement technology in the areas of largescale physics experiments, environment and energy, information technology, and life sciences. The institute strategy focuses on SI-based highly integrated System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions.

Almost 1000 years old, the University of Bologna (UNIBO) is known as the oldest University of the western world. Nowadays, UNIBO is one of the most important institutions of higher education across Europe and the second largest university in Italy with 11 Schools, 33 Departments and about 84.000 students; it is organised in a multi-campus structure with 5 operating sites (Bologna, Cesena, Forlì, Ravenna and Rimini), and, since 1998, also a permanent headquarters in Buenos Aires. With regard to the international reputation, UNIBO has been awarded the use of the logo “HR Excellence in Research” and is among the top 5 Italian universities in the main International rankings.

With regard to the capability of attracting funding, UNIBO is very active both at National and European level. At European level, with 87,8 million Euros from FP7 and other EU funded programs (274 projects funded in 2007-2013; in 58 of them UNIBO was coordinator) UNIBO is the third Italian university for the attractiveness of European funding for research, in the top-50 in the European ranking of institutions of higher education. In Horizon 2020, UNIBO is involved in more than 60 funded projects. UNIBO is also affiliate partner of the EIT KIC “EIT ICT Labs”.

The activity of the University of Bologna will be conducted within Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI) and the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering (DEI). DISI is one of the strongest centres for computer science and engineering research, covering such diverse areas as artificial intelligence, autonomic and complex systems, bio-informatics, middleware systems, networks, programming languages, formal methods, hardware and software systems and their applications in medicine, energy, environment and society, to cite just a few. DEI is one of the largest departments in UNIBOs with an excellent research profile, attracting more than 25% of UNIBOs overall EU funding.

Within DEI, the research activity of the group in EPI are carried out by the Energy-Efficient Embedded Systems Lab, covering areas related to compilers, programming models and architectures in the domain of both embedded and high-performance energy efficient multi- and many-core systems on a chip and large-scale distributed system. Its flagship project on energy efficient multi-many-core systems on a chip, the parallel ultra-low power platform (PULP) is a co-development of the EEES lab and the IIS in ETHZ and allows researchers access to a state-of-the-art processor cores based on the open RISC-V ISA for advanced computing ad application acceleration. Whereas its flagship project on high performance computing systems, the (Development of an Added Value Infrastructure Designed in Europe), is an OpenPOWER based supercomputing system co-developed with E4 engineering with a quantum leap in out-of-band power and performance monitoring large scale systems and today is ranked in the top 20 most energy efficient supercomputer worldwide.

The University of Zagreb, Croatia (1669) is the oldest and biggest university in South-Eastern Europe. Ever since its foundation, the University has been continually growing and developing and now consists of 29 faculties and three art academies. With its comprehensive programmes and over 50,000 full-time undergraduate and postgraduate students the University is the strongest research and teaching institution in the region. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at University of Zagreb is the leading Croatian academic and R&D institution in the field of electrical engineering and ICT. The Faculty is constituted of 12 departments. The present research and educational staff comprises more than 140 professors and 230 teaching and research assistants and around 3.000 students at the bachelor level, 1.300 students at the master level and 470 PhD students. The Faculty has developed respectable international cooperation with many institutions around the world and has been involved in numerous FP7, H2020 and other projects in the past.

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (FhG) is Europe’s largest organisation for application-oriented research. Founded in 1949, the organisation undertakes applied research that drives economic development and serves the wider benefit of society. Its services are solicited by customers and contractual partners in industry, the service sector and public administration. The majority of the more than 20,000 staff are qualified scientists and engineers.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Mathematics (ITWM) in Kaiserslautern, Germany, focuses on mathematical approaches to practical challenges like optimization and visualisation. With computer simulations being an indispensable tool in the design and optimization of products and production processes, real models are being replaced by virtual models and mathematics play a fundamental role in the creation of this virtual world. Core competences of the ITWM include processing of large data sets, drafting of mathematical models, problem solving in numerical algorithms, summarization of data sets, interactive optimization of solutions, and visualization of simulation and sensor data.

As part of Fraunhofer ITWM, the Competence Center for High Performance Computing (CC-HPC) develops innovative HPC solutions for the industry and participates in national and international research programs. Since its foundation in 2002, the CC-HPC focuses primarily on parallel application development and development of HPC tools. This includes the communication middleware GPI (Global Address Space Programming Interface), the GPI-Space programming environment for HPC and Big Data applications, and the BeeGFS File System.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS is one of the world’s leading application-oriented research institutions for microelectronic and IT system solutions and services. With the creation of mp3 and the co-development of AAC, Fraunhofer IIS has reached worldwide recognition. In close cooperation with partners and clients the institute provides research and development services in the following areas: Audio & Multimedia, Integrated System Design, Communication Systems, Sensor Systems, Imaging Systems, Energy Management, Positioning, Medical Technology, Safety and Security Technology and Supply Chain Management. About 950 employees conduct contract research for industry, the service sector and public authorities. Founded in 1985 in Erlangen, Fraunhofer IIS has now 13 locations in 10 cities: in Erlangen (headquarters), Nürnberg, Fürth, Dresden, further in Bamberg, Waischenfeld, Coburg, Würzburg, Ilmenau and Deggendorf.

STMicroelectronics is a global semiconductor company with net revenues of US$ 6.97 billion in 2016. The company is listed: NYSE, Euronext Paris and Borsa Italiana, Milan. It has approximately 43,500 employees worldwide and approximately 7,500 people working in R&D. It has 11 manufacturing sites and more than 75 sales and marketing offices worldwide. Offering one of the industry’s broadest product portfolios, ST serves customers across the spectrum of electronics applications with innovative semiconductor solutions for Smart Driving and the Internet of Things by leveraging its vast array of technologies, design expertise and combination of intellectual property portfolio, strategic partnerships and manufacturing strength. ST’s products are found everywhere today, and together with our customers, we are enabling smarter driving and smarter factories, cities, and homes, along with the next generation of mobile and Internet of Things devices. To keep its technology edge, ST has maintained an unwavering commitment to R&D since its creation. Almost one fifth of our people work in R&D and product design and in 2015 the Company spent about 21% of its revenue in R&D. Among the industry’s most innovative Companies, ST owns and continuously refreshes a substantial patent library (~15,000 owned patents in ~9,000 patent families and 500 new patent filings). The Company draws on a rich pool of chip fabrication technologies, including advanced FD-SOI (Fully Depleted Silicon-on- Insulator), CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor), Imaging technologies, RF-SOI (RF Silicon-On-Insulator), Bi-CMOS, BCD (Bipolar, CMOS, DMOS), and MEMS technologies. ST believes in the benefit of owning manufacturing facilities and operating them in close proximity with its R&D operations. Sustainability has been a guiding principle for STMicroelectronics for more than 20 years and we have been a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) since 2000. As a full member of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) we participate in the collective efforts of the industry to find solutions to our biggest sustainability challenges, such as conflict minerals, environmental protection, social issues, health and safety-protection. in addition to playing a key role in Europe`s advanced technology research programs such as CATRENE (Cluster for Application and Technology Research in Europe on NanoElectronics), industry initiatives such as ENIAC (European Nano-electronics Initiative) and ARTEMIS (Embedded Computing Systems Initiative). ST is one of the founding members of EPoSS, the European Technology Platform on Smart Systems Integration. Currently, Andrea Cuomo ST Executive VP is Chairman of the Governing Board at EU’s ECSEL Joint Undertaking.

Founded in 2002, E4 Computer Engineering has been innovating and actively encouraging the adoption of new computing and storage technologies. Because new ideas are so important, E4 invests heavily in research and the success achieved up to now is a clear proof of the winning strategy. E4 has been bringing to the market a chain of innovations, like the first Infiniband cluster based on commodity processors (2005), the first ARMbased multi-node cluster connected via the Infiniband network and powered by GPU accelerators (2012), and the first liquid cooled, OpenPOWER-based, multi-node cluster connected via the Infiniband network, with onnode NVIDIA accelerators and featuring a non-intrusive equipment for high-sampling-rate power measuring and capping, co-developed by E4. Because of E4’s comprehensive range of hardware products, software stack and value-added services, E4 can propose customers and prospects with complete solutions for their most demanding workloads in: HPC, Big-Data, AI, Deep Learning, Data Analytics, Cognitive Computing and for any challenging Storage and Computing requirements.

The University of Pisa is part of the Pisa University System, which includes the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies. In the science and engineering field, University of Pisa is ranked between first and third places nationally, in the top 150 in the world. University of Pisa has 57,000 students (of which 53,000 undergraduate, and 3,500 for doctoral and specialization studies) and has Bachelor, Master, PhD degree courses, and also Summer Schools in the fields of Science, Engineering, Law, Economy and Management, Medicine, Arts and Humanities. Most of Master and PhD courses and all Summer Schools are held in English. The University has also a close link (with sharing of persons, structures and equipment) with other research centers in Pisa, such as the CNR (National Research Council) which has in Pisa its biggest research center with more than 1000 researchers, mainly in the ICT field, and the INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics Research) which has key role in International experiments such those at CERN (ATLAS, CMS). Pisa is the site of the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO). The research and teaching activity at University of Pisa is held in 20 Departments of which the Department of Information Engineering (DII) (http://www.dii.unipi.it/en/), involved in this project, is in charge of research, teaching and technology transfer activities in the fields of Electronics, Telecommunications, Computer Engineering, Applied Electromagnetism, Automation and Robotics, Vehicle Engineering. DII has been awarded as a “Department of Excellence” from Italian Government with a special funding of 9 MEuros in 2018-2022 to sustain the rise of 5 multidisciplinary labs, CrossLabs, to support Industry4.0 national initiative crosslab.dii.unipi.it. DII hosts research units from CNR and from CNIT and CINI, which are the national interuniversity consortia for Telecommunications and Informatics, respectively. DII has joint labs with STMicroelectronics and RICO. Professors and/or post-doc from DII founded many start-up companies (among them Ingeniars, Quantavis, Qrobotics, Cubitlab, Netresults, PurePowerControl, Yogitech, etc.). Yogitech has been acquired in April 2017 by INTEL creating in Pisa an INTEL R&D research center focused on Functional Safety for IoT and Automotive. University of PisaDII has a strong technology transfer activity in the field of ICT and Engineering, particularly electronics applied to automotive and industrial-automation/robotics, as witnessed by the fact that many international companies are established in the Pisa area, such as AMS, Dialog-Semiconductor, Hanking Electronics, Ericsson, INTEL, in the ICT field and Piaggio, Continental, Magna, Pierburg, DAB pumps, KatoImer, Leonardo, Saint Gobain, ENEL Green Power, INTECS, IDS  in the vehicle and automation fields. The DII is the teaching center for 5 Bachelor degrees and 8 Master degrees (4 held in English) with about 700 new students enrolled each year. The DII is also the site of the PhD School in Information Engineering with 30 new PhD students per Year, the IEEE CAS Society Summer School “Enabling technologies for the Internet of Things” and a post-graduate Master in Cybersecurity. The DII has 9 IEEE Fellows, 2 ERC winners and has strategic partnerships with the European and Italian Space Agencies. Within the EPI proposal, the University of Pisa, under the scientific management of Prof. Sergio Saponara, will be involved with its automotive electronics and cybersecurity research groups, which have expertise in embedded high-performance computing and functional safety for application fields characterized by harsh-environment operations (automotive, industrial-automation/robotics, aerospace). The proposing team has founded the spin-off Ingeniars http://www.ingeniars.com.

SURF creates a bridge between research and advanced ICT. We do so with a passion for scientific research in our DNA and with extensive expertise contained in our high-performance infrastructure. This enables us to facilitate scientific research and develop initiatives for the business community.

SURF is the National Supercomputing and e-Science Support Center in the Netherlands. Among SURF’s customers are all of the Dutch Universities, a number of large research, educational and government institutions, and the business community. The mission of SURF is to support research in the Netherlands by the development and provision of advanced ICT infrastructure, services and expertise. SURF provides expertise and services in the areas of High-Performance Computing, e-Science & Cloud Services, Data Services, Network support, and Visualization. SURF has a long history and a proven track record in providing HPC services to the Dutch research community. The national supercomputing service includes administration of the system, helpdesk, training, software and application support, for both general-purpose systems as well as accelerator-equipped systems. Important focus is on supporting users to enable grand challenge applications. SURF has built broad expertise in the implementation and e-science support of grid infrastructures for the scientific research community. SURF provides also HPC-Cloud and Hadoop/Big Data services to support research.

Kalray is a fabless semiconductor and software provider for high performance embedded systems. Founded in 2008, Kalray has about 65 employees (45 of which in engineering and R&D) and 4 offices worldwide in Grenoble and Paris (France), Los Altos (CA, USA) and Tokyo (Japan).  Kalray’s current products include:

1. the MPPA® manycore processors, composed of clusters of 16 VLIW cores each, with clusters interconnected by a high-speed network on chip;
2. a series of associated applicatio development tools, GNU C/C++, OpenCL, OpenVX programming environments, run-time libraries, and operating systems including Linux;
3. application and reference design boards based on the MPPA® manycore processors.

The MPPA® processors are designed to deliver high performances and excellent energy efficiency for target applications domains in high-performance embedded computing and datacenter networking and storage function acceleration. The MPPA2-256 processor code-named Bostan includes 256 32-bit VLIW cores running at up to 600MHz and distributed across 16 clusters; it is produced since 2015 with the CMOS 28nm HP process from TSMC. The third-generation MPPA3-80 processor code-named Coolidge includes 80 64-bit VLIW cores running at up to 1.2GHz and distributed among 5 clusters; it is scheduled for tape-out in TSMC CMOS 16FFC at the end of 2018. The MPPA cores implement a modern, compiler-friendly VLIW architecture that provides strong timing predictability properties, while delivering scalar performances competitive with high-end superscalar application processors. Starting with the MPPA3, each VLIW core has an attached coprocessor which accelerates deep learning and linear algebra applications. The MPPA® processors are also distinguished by high-performance, low-latency I/O interfaces: 8x 10Gbps Ethernet and 16x PCIe Gen3 for the MPPA® Bostan processor; 8x 25Gbps Ethernet and 16x PCIe Gen4 for the MPPA® Coolidge processor.

EXTOLL GmbH was established in 2011 as a spin-off of the University of Heidelberg. The EXTOLL research project has already been pursued for more than 5 years by the Computer Architecture Group of the University of Heidelberg prior to the founding of EXTOLL GmbH which fully licenced all research results and continues to develop the technology, still in cooperation with the university, notably the group of Prof. Brüning. The company develops interconnect technology (IP, hardware, firmware, management software und middleware) for high-performance computing (HPC) and Data Center applications. A highly elaborated and efficient technology could be developed that perfectly links to current and upcoming computer architectures. EXTOLL GmbH is venture capital backed and has raised up to now in three investment rounds funding solely from investors from Germany. In 2013 EXTOLL GmbH started production of its TOURMALET ASIC, a truly high-performance HPC interconnection network (see also below). The research and development team at EXTOLL has a vast experience and knowledge with developing the complete stack for communication in HPC, from low-level ASIC and hardware design, ASCI PHY IPs (e.g. high-speed SerDES), PCB design, manufacturing to system architecture, verification and necessary software development. The EXTOLL interconnection technology was already used in its FPGA based implementations in different projects, including the FP7 EU project DEEP. With the TOURMALET ASIC a very high-performance implementation is available as a product, where one of the first use cases was in the FP7 project DEEP-ER. EXTOLL TOURMALET is also a unique interconnection solution for HPC because it was completely developed in Europe by a European SME. EXTOLL also offers ASIC IP blocks and ASIC design services to customers.

CINECA, established in 1969, is a non-profit consortium of 70 Italian Universities, the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS), the National Research Council (CNR), and the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). CINECA is the national supercomputing facility, one of the largest in Europe; its HPC infrastructure is equipped with cutting-edge technology and it offers highly qualified personnel that cooperate with researchers and customers for the most effective exploitation of the HPC systems, in both the academic and industrial fields. SCAI (SuperComputing Applications and Innovation) is the CINECA High Performance Computing Department. The mission of SCAI is to accelerate the scientific discovery by providing high performance computing resources, data management and storage systems and tools and HPC services and expertise at large, aiming to develop and promote technical and scientific services related to high-performance computing for the Italian and European research community.

BMW Group is a global manufacturer of premium class automobiles and motorcycles, covering the BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce brands. In 2016 about 2,36 Million automobiles and more than 145.000 motor cycles were built and sold worldwide at total revenues of approximately 94 Billion €. The BMW headquarters are located in Munich and main German production sites are located in Munich, Regensburg, Dingolfing, Leipzig, Berlin and Landshut. Beyond these German plants there are major production sites in Austria, South Africa, USA, Great Britain and China. In addition to its strong position in the automotive and motorcycle market, BMW Group also offers its customers a successful range of financial services. In recent years, it has also established itself as a leading provider of premium services for individual mobility. At the end of the reporting period 2016, BMW Group employed a workforce of roughly 124,000 people worldwide.

The BMW Group brands BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce are three of the strongest premium brands in the automotive industry today. Vehicles built by the BMW Group offer superb product substance in terms of aesthetic appeal, dynamic performance, technology and quality, and underline the company’s leading position in innovation and technology.

Corporate sustainability is firmly established as a guiding principle of the company’s strategy and culture. The BMW Group complies with the ten principles of the Global Compact and the Cleaner Production Declaration of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). In addition, the company also adheres to the agreements of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the OECD’s guidelines for multinational companies and the Business Charter for Sustainable Development issued by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).

In Munich, BMW operates its own research and development centre, called FIZ (Forschungs- und Innovationszentrum = Research and Innovation Centre), in which future cars are developed and research and predevelopment on various fields of vehicle, systems and infrastructure design are conducted.  BMW Group´s expenditures for R&D summed up to 5,16 Billion € in 2016. Since BMW Group has a long tradition in participating in joint research, its associates are very well experienced in conducting and participating in national and European joint research programs.

Elektrobit (EB) is an award-winning and visionary global supplier of embedded solutions, cloud computing and services for the automotive industry. A leader in automotive software, with over 25 years serving the industry, EB’s products power over 70 million vehicles and offer flexible, innovative software solutions for connected car infrastructure, human machine interface (HMI) technologies, navigation, driver assistance, electronic control units (ECUs), and software engineering services. EB provides technologies and flexible software platforms, tools, and services to help automotive manufacturers and their suppliers to deliver the best products and services in order to meet the needs of drivers. EB was founded in 1988 as 3SOFT GmbH, Germany and was acquired in 2004 by the Finnish Elektrobit Corporation. Later 3SOFT changed its name to Elektrobit Automotive GmbH (EB). In 2015 Continental AG acquired Elektrobit Automotive GmbH.

Prove & Run’s mission is to help our customers resolve the security challenges linked to the deployment of connected devices and of the Internet of Things. Prove & Run is a rapidly-growing software company founded by Dominique Bolignano in 2009. It is independent, financially secure, and has its headquarters in Paris, France.

Prove & Run commercialises cost effective, highly secured, off-the-shelf Secure OS and hypervisors that dramatically improve the level of security of connected systems:

• ProvenCore: a formally proven OS kernel. It is a new generation ultra-secure OS. ProvenCore is typically used to run security-critical applications (FOTA, VPN, firewalls, authentication systems, etc.) and to protect the security of existing non-secure operating systems. ProvenCore is available on ARM Cortex-A and Cortex-M architectures and soon on RiscV architectures.
• ProvenVisor: a formally proven secure hypervisor. It is a new generation ultra-secure hypervisor. ProvenVisor is typically used for secure isolation of existing operating systems and legacy software stacks. ProvenVisor is available on ARM Cortex-A architectures.

Prove & Run’s main competencies are in Security and Architecture, Operating Systems, Formal Methods and Security Certification. For each of those competencies, we have industry-recognized experts backed up by years of experience in the digital security market, in particular in the smart card and the mobile security industries.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is a higher education and research organization with about 9,500 employees, 25,000 students. KIT is one of the largest national research centers in the Helmholtz Association and in Germany. It has gained extensive experience from more than 1000 completed and on-going projects.

The ITIV, under the corporate lead of Prof. Jürgen Becker, Prof. Eric Sax and Prof. Wilhelm Stork, is part of the electrical engineering department at KIT. The institute is focusing on the following research areas: VLSI integration, embedded HW/SW Co-Design, computer-aided design methods, as well as dependable microsystems.

Within EPI, the ITIV will collaborate in the eHPC platform at system architecture level and HW/SW co-design. It already has a record of accomplishment with both BMW and Infineon as automotive partners in research cooperation projects like ARAMIS the largest German national initiative on efficient multicore deployment in embedded. Due to ITIVs wide experience in System on Chip (SoC) design, ITIV is contributing designs and co-processors using the eFPGA cell delivered by Menta. Those will be both flexible in deployment and adaptable. The experience of ITIV is backed by on-going or completed projects such as ARGO, ALMA, Morpheus, among others.

Realize a new level of flexibility in SOC design with embedded programmable logic from Menta. Building flexibility into SoCs allows common design issues to be handled at will, post production.
With Menta eFPGA IP cores, designers can fix a bug, accommodate a changing standard, or add a desired application feature without the need for a costly and time-consuming re-design.
Menta eFPGA IP Cores have applications in Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Automotive, Aerospace & Defence, Security and many more.

Created by Philippe Notton, SiPearl is the company that is bringing to life the European Processor Initiative (EPI) project, designing the high-performance, low-power microprocessor for the European exascale supercomputer.

This new generation of microprocessors will enable Europe to set out its technological sovereignty on the strategic markets for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and connected mobility.

SiPearl will develop and market its solutions through close collaboration with its 26 partners from the EPI – scientific community, supercomputing centers and leading names from the IT, electronics and automotive sectors – which are its stakeholders and future clients.

Kernkonzept is a specialist in secure and safe virtualization and
operating-system technology. Our customers build complex software
products for safety-, security-, and mission-critical applications,
often requiring certification or accreditation. Based on our
open-source L4Re technology – a scalable microkernel-based
operating-system and hypervisor platform – we engineer system
solutions with a minimal attack surface, real-time capabilities, and
virtualization support. Our deeply experienced operating-system
engineers tailor these solutions to the needs of safety-conscious
markets, such as automotive, as well as to high-assurance-security,
cloud, server and embedded markets. We are committed to support our
customers with comprehensive and individual architectural consulting
and engineering to facilitate their success. Kernkonzept GmbH is an
SME based in Dresden, Germany.

Leonardo S.p.A. develops multi-domain operational capabilities in the Aerospace, Defence and Security sector.

The company plays a prominent role in major international strategic programmes and is a trusted technological partner of governments, defence agencies, institutions and enterprises. Innovation, continuous research, digital manufacturing and sustainability are the cornerstones of Leonardo’s business worldwide.