The FFplus Industry Forum will take place on 28 October 2026 in Munich
In today’s data-driven economy, supercomputing is no longer reserved for large corporations or research institutions. SMEs increasingly use HPC and AI to solve complex challenges, speed up development cycles, make smarter decisions, and create new business opportunities.
The FFplus Industry Forum offers a practical, collaborative environment where innovation meets real industrial needs, and where new ideas, partnerships, and opportunities can emerge.
SMEs, Industry End-Users, join us in Munich for the FFplus Industry Forum, a dedicated industry-focused event bringing together SMEs, technology providers, HPC experts, innovators, and policy representatives to explore how High-Performance Computing (HPC), AI, genAI and advanced digital technologies are already transforming business across Europe.
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Two events. One community. One goal: driving industrial impact.
Taking place immediately after the DoITNow HPC Roundtableat the same venue, the Forum continues the conversation with a strong focus on practical industrial applications, real business challenges, and measurable impact.
While the HPC Roundtablehighlights the future of computing, AI Factories, data infrastructures, and emerging technologies, the FFplus Industry Forum brings the real-life business perspective to the stage showcasing how European SMEs and industry are already turning innovation into competitive advantage. The showcased experiments address real industrial challenges and demonstrate how technologies such as HPC, AI, LLM, Digital Twins, Simulations, Advanced Data Analytics, IoT, which can help companies accelerate innovation, optimize processes, improve products and services, and strengthen competitiveness in the global market. SMEs will also share valuable hands-on experiences from using HPC technologies, including access to the EuroHPC JU supercomputing infrastructure, together with practical insights, challenges encountered, and lessons learned throughout their innovation journey.
Participants will discover inspiring real-world success stories presented directly by SMEs and project partners who successfully implemented advanced HPC and AI solutions through FFplus experiments.
The programme will feature:
· FFplus success stories and practical AI/HPC applications;
· Interactive panel discussions with industry representatives and experts;
· Networking opportunities with companies, technology providers, and innovation stakeholders;
· Exchange of experiences, challenges, and future collaboration opportunities.
Agenda
9:00 – 9:30 Registration & Coffee Time
9:30 – 9:50 Welcome: Bastian Koller (HLRS, Managing Director), Mladen Skelin (EUROHPC JU, Programme Manager)
9:50 – 10:10 Fortissimo Projects: More Than a Decade of Bringing HPC to Business: Bastian Koller (HLRS, Managing Director)
This presentation looks back at more than a decade of Fortissimo projects helping businesses harness High-Performance Computing (HPC) to solve real-world challenges, accelerate innovation and improve competitiveness. Through industrial examples, it highlights the business value of HPC and the opportunities it creates for SMEs to turn advanced technologies into practical solutions.
10:10 – 10:30 Your Next AI Investment: From Computing Power to Business Value: Marco Merkel, (Do IT Now Germany GmbH, CEO)
This keynote offers SMEs a practical framework for planning their next AI investment. It explores three key questions: What business outcome do you want to achieve? What are the main bottlenecks in your workflow? What requirements must the solution meet?
Through simple examples, including the impact of numerical precision, participants will learn how to assess whether additional computing power can deliver tangible business benefits. The keynote highlights what to measure and validate before choosing hardware, an access model and an operational approach, while showing how to build on existing investments. The perspective is independent and vendor-neutral, helping SMEs make informed, business-driven decisions about AI infrastructure.
10:30 – 10:50 Success Story: Improving AI Models for Antibody-Antigen Protein Structure Prediction with Experimental Data: Wouter Van Putte (PUXANO, CEO)
AI tools such as AlphaFold 2 have transformed protein structure prediction, a key step in developing new therapeutic treatments. However, predicting antigen–antibody complex structures remains challenging. This presentation explores how combining experimental data with AI can improve prediction accuracy, accelerate structural biology research and make epitope mapping more cost-effective, supporting more efficient development of new therapies.
10:50 – 11:00 Video: Innovation Study: Generative AI-based co-Pilot Supporting Citizen in Energy Transition
11:00 – 11:30 Coffee break
11:30 – 11:50 Success Story: Guidance & Atmospheric INference for Station-keeping: Paolo Marcandelli (Involve Space)
The GAINS project develops a Bayesian model for real-time probabilistic forecasting of stratospheric winds, helping balloons maintain their position during flight. It combines on-board measurements, ensemble weather forecasts and historical atmospheric data using a Hybrid Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (HLETKF).
To process over 15 years of climatological data, the project developed a parallel, HPC-scalable pipeline for computing climatological covariance. This presentation explores how HPC and real-time data assimilation transform large-scale atmospheric data into actionable wind estimates, improving decision-making for balloon station-keeping missions.
11:50 – 12:30 PANEL: From Idea to Business: How SMEs and Industry Can Unlock the Value of HPC (George Stavroulakis - Nessos and NComp, Sowjanya Kauzu - Perplant AI, Gregor Weiss - Merck Group, Andreas Wierse - SICOS BW GmbH)
High-Performance Computing is no longer exclusively a tool for large research organisations or technology companies. Increasingly, businesses of all sizes are exploring how HPC can help them solve complex problems, accelerate innovation and develop new products and services. But the needs and challenges of an SME can be very different from those of a large industrial organisation with its own HPC infrastructure.
This panel brings together perspectives from both sides to explore what it really takes to integrate HPC into business processes. Speakers will share their experiences of moving from an initial HPC experiment towards practical business applications, discuss what SMEs can learn from large industrial users, and examine when it makes sense to use external HPC resources versus investing in on-premise infrastructure.
12:30 – 12:50 Success Story: Turning Industrial Challenges in Critical Raw Materials Recovery into Solutions with HPC: Panagiota Stamatopoulou PhD, (MONOLITHOS, Project Manager)
This presentation explores how High-Performance Computing (HPC) can help industry recover critical raw materials more efficiently and sustainably. Using the OPTILEACH project as an industrial case study, it demonstrates how computational modelling supports process optimisation, reduces resource and energy consumption, and enables better-informed decisions towards more sustainable and competitive recovery processes.
12:50 – 13:00 Video: Aerodynamic and Structural Optimisation of Modular Bicycles Using HPC
13:00 –14:00 Lunch & Networking
14:00 – 14:20 From HPC to AI: How SMEs Benefit and Why Support is Key: Mark Parsons (EPCC, Executive Director)
Since 1994, EPCC has helped SMEs and larger companies harness HPC for modelling, simulation and, more recently, AI. Drawing on 30 years of experience working with thousands of companies, this presentation explores how technologies have evolved while the business benefits of supercomputing remain substantial, helping companies innovate, optimise processes and stay competitive.
14:20 – 14:40 Success Story: AEC Sector Transformation Through AI: Mehmet Dolgan (Co-Founder of Conium AI)
This presentation introduces an HPC-powered, physics-informed AI model for energy management in non-residential buildings. Combining deep learning with smart meter, operational and weather data, the solution forecasts energy demand, detects and diagnoses anomalies in real time, and visualises energy hotspots to support actionable decisions. By leveraging existing data, it reduces the need for additional sensors and helps lower capital and operational costs.
14:40 – 15:10 PANEL: Making AI Work in Europe: From Innovation to Responsible Business (Dennis Hoppe - HLRS, Till Riedel - KIT, Yamaç Alican Isik - Noamai, Vahid Bokharaie - CogniBIT)
AI is moving rapidly from experimentation to commercial products and services, creating both opportunities and challenges for European SMEs. This panel will explore the practical realities of bringing AI to market: choosing the right approach for a given use case, including when an LLM is not the best option, while balancing performance, cost, data and infrastructure requirements.
The discussion will also address how SMEs can navigate evolving requirements such as the EU AI Act and GDPR without slowing innovation, and how European HPC infrastructure and AI Factories can support the development, scaling and commercialisation of competitive, trusted and compliant AI services.
15:10 –15:30 Success Story: How iMTED AI Energy Assistant Exploits HPC to Diagnose Energy Anomalies and Saves Energy for SMEs: Shahnewaz Shuva (iMTED)
This presentation introduces an HPC-powered, physics-informed AI model for energy management in non-residential buildings. Combining deep learning with existing smart meter, operational and weather data, the solution forecasts energy demand, detects and diagnoses anomalies in real time, and visualises energy hotspots to support informed decisions. By making better use of existing data, it reduces the need for additional sensors and helps lower capital and operational costs.
15:30 –16:00 Coffee break
16:00 – 16:20 Success Story: How HPC Turned a Weed-Detection Vision Based Camera Solution into a Market-Ready Product: Sowjanya Kauzu (PerPlant ApS, Business Development Lead)
This presentation shows how Danish agtech SME PerPlant used the EuroHPC Leonardo supercomputer to train a Vision Transformer on 267,324 field images, enabling real-time weed detection at tractor speed. It explores the journey from HPC-based training to AI deployment in the field, highlighting how access to supercomputing helped the company overcome technical bottlenecks and bring its solution closer to commercial scale in a €56.5 billion market.
16:20 – 16:30 Success Story: NowcastAI - Solving Short-Term Energy Trading by AI Driven Weather Forecasting: Daniel Gröger, Alitiq (Founder & CTO)
Trading solar PV electricity on the EPEX SPOT market is challenging due to weather-driven production volatility. Accurate forecasts for the next 2–4 hours are crucial for traders and electricity system operators. This presentation introduces a machine-learning weather model for short-term solar irradiance forecasting, designed to outperform traditional numerical weather prediction methods and support better-informed trading and operational decisions.
16:30 – 17:00 Open Stage: Lessons Learnt & Experiences Exchange
Whether you are already working with HPC and AI technologies or simply exploring how these technologies can support your business growth, this event is designed to inspire, connect, and open new possibilities.