PRACE SHAPE: projects for the SME Eric Pascolo Cineca
SHAPE, the SME (Small Medium Enterprises) HPC Adoption Programme in Europe is a panEuropean, PRACE-based programme supporting HPC adoption by SMEs. The Program aims to raise awareness and equip European SMEs with the necessary expertise to take advantage of the innovation possibilities opened up by HPC, thus increasing their competitiveness. SMEs can receive machine time on a PRACE system, and, most important, effort from a PRACE expert that will work alongside the SME in evaluating and/or developing the HPC-based solution. In return the SME provides in-kind effort, publicity of their participation in SHAPE, and a public White Paper on the work achieved in the project at its conclusion. In 2019 the Axyon Fintech company worked with Cineca on SHAPE Project to “reshape� its AI workload management platform to use large scalable HPC systems.
The use of HPC in finance has become very important because of the advent of Big Data. The increasing use of AI algorithms and the consequently fast-growing need for computational power require the use of large scalable HPC systems able to handle and explore a wide array of Machine Learning models (e.g. deep neural networks) and to remain up-todate with state-of-the-art methods. Deep Neural Network classifies human tasks and forecasts mental workload parameters, based on eye-tracking and electroencephalogram data, combined with video analysis during driving test. Over the years Cineca has hosted and supported 9 SHAPE projects and we are receiving more and more interest from SMEs to use and bring applications on HPC systems, both to optimize execution times and to use massively parallel systems to implement new business models.
Research To Business 2019: Eric Pascolo (Cineca) and Riccardo Folloni (Axyon)
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