ENHANCING INNOVATION AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE EUROPEAN INDUSTRY
FFplus is a successor of previous Fortissimo projects (Fortissimo, Fortissimo-2, FF4EuroHPC), which have directly addressed how to overcome the barriers for SMEs by utilising HPC, HPDA or AI to optimise or develop products or processes and aimed to strengthen the global competitiveness of European industry.
During the FFplus project (2024-2028), six Open Calls will be published to acquire business experiments and innovation studies, targeting the highest quality experiments involving innovative, agile SMEs, showcasing the transformative potential of HPC and generative AI. Proposals will address business challenges faced by European SMEs and startups from various industrial sectors.
FFplus OPEN CALL
The second FFplus Open Call for Business Experiments is now open! Submission deadline is August 26th, 2025, 17:00 CET!
During the project's lifetime, SMEs and Start-ups will be supported through six open calls to fund business experiments (Type 1) and innovation studies (Type 2).
Business experiments will address the uptake of HPC by SMEs in order to solve specific business challenges of SMEs that have had no prior use of, or experience with, HPC services.
Innovation studies, in contrast, will support European SMEs and Start-ups already active in the field of generative AI technology, which lack the necessary computational resources to scale up.
Learn more about the FFplus Sub-projects!
Through the first Open Call, 37 sub-projects received funding — 18 Innovation Studies and 19 Business Experiments. The 19 funded Business Experiments consist of a total of 43 organisations, including 34 SMEs and 9 other organisations from 15 countries. The 18 funded Innovation Studies involve a total of 36 organisations, including 20 SMEs and 16 other organisations from 14 countries.
Learn more!
CREATING INSPIRING SUCCESS STORIES
The publication of success stories from the experiments, showing the benefits and impacts of adopting HPC in the SMEs business models, and from the innovation studies, showing the effect of adopting large-scale HPC resources for the development of generative AI, will take place during the project duration.
Within the Fortissimo projects, 121 success stories were produced in collaboration with 310 partners from over 20 European countries.
Get inspired by Fortissimo success stories here!
COLLABORATION WITH NATIONAL COMPETENCE CENTRES AND DIGITAL INNOVATION HUBS
FFplus represents a key tool for the National Competence Centres (NCCs) and Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) to foster their work with SMEs and to facilitate the widening of industrial HPC user communities and service providers in Europe.
The National Competence Centres (NCCs) are the central points of contact for HPC and related technologies in 32 European countries.
Find the list of all NCCs here.
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The FFplus consortium consists of 7 HPC expert organisations from the private sector with lots of experience gained while working with Industry, other HPC experts and the Academy on several R&D EU projects. The project is coordinated by the High Performance Computing Center (HLRS).
