The second phase of the CASTIEL and EuroCC projects has just started and BSC is leading the area of training, twinning and mentoring of CASTIEL.
CASTIEL2 and EuroCC2 have just started after the official kick-off meeting held some days ago. The EuroHPC JU continues to fund these flagship projects to build a European network of National Competence Centres (NCCs) for HPC, acting as a hub to promote and facilitate HPC uptake and related technologies across a range of industries.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is leading, as we did in the first phase of the project, the training, twinning and mentoring area in CASTIEL2. BSC will develop strategies and plans to achieve the following objectives of the Training area for the next three years:
- To promote outreach and pan-European visibility of HPC training opportunities to NCCs, industry, the public sector and academia and foster integration and inclusion of Centres of Excellence (CoEs).
- To organise twinning and mentoring to support the interactions among NCCs and between NCCs and CoEs on training and other areas of interest, e.g., collaboration with industry, collaboration with academia & public sector and other areas of interest to transfer knowledge and information, including mobility.
- To coordinate the definition and implementation of the European HPC training baseline for industry, SMEs and academia/research/the public sector. A common certification baseline of training and modular training approaches will also be addressed in collaboration with other European initiatives and actors.
About EuroCC2 and CASTIEL2
The role of EuroCC 2 is to continue to run a network of more than 30 NCCs across the EuroHPC Participating States. The NCCs act as single points of access in each country between stakeholders and national and EuroHPC systems. They operate on a regional and national level to liaise with local communities, in particular SMEs, map HPC competencies and facilitate access to European HPC resources for users from the private and public sector.
EuroCC 2 delivers training, interacts with industry, develops competence mapping and communication materials and activities, and supports the adoption of HPC services in other related fields, such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI), high performance data analytics (HPDA) to expand the HPC user base.
The latest phase of this initiative will build on the achievements of EuroCC, in particular supporting and further developing the HPC Competence Centres and building the overall European HPC ecosystem.
CASTIEL 2 promotes interaction and exchange of expertise and competence across the NCC network. The project encourages collaboration, exchange of knowledge between HPC practitioners, expertise and best practices between Participating States and the mapping of skills and competences across Europe to support cohesion and a more consistent level of expertise across Europe. In this next phase of the project, the CASTIEL 2 project also takes on an additional role of providing similar coordination support to the EuroHPC Centres of Excellence (CoEs). The CoEs gather HPC expertise in the development of HPC applications by scientific domain at a European level, CASTIEL 2 will build a stronger HPC community which will foster strategic collaboration in HPC research and deployment of skills and in expertise in HPC technologies and applications between CoEs and NCCs.
The objective of both projects is to strengthen the European Union (EU)’s technological autonomy and competitiveness by ensuring a coordinated and consistent high level of knowledge sharing across Europe in HPC and related disciplines such as high-performance data analytics (HPDA) and HPC-based artificial intelligence.
- Further information here.
