2nd Call for TTP Proposals for HPC

Closed

Start: April 1, 2019
Deadline: July 1, 2019
Budget: EUR 45 000

Partial Funding for bilateral Academia-Industry Technology Transfer Projects in HPC

Eurolab4HPC is a Coordination Action funded by the European Commission under H2020 with the bold commitment to build the foundation for a European Research Center of Excellence in High-Performance Computing (HPC) Systems.

A funded Technology Transfer Project (TTP) typically lasts 6 months and needs to end by 30 April 2020. A TTP performs a bilateral technology transfer between one academic partner as technology provider and one industry partner as technology receiver. During this call, only one TTP project will be granted. The minimum total budget of the TTP is 90 000 EUR, of which Eurolab4HPC can pay up to 50% (45 000 EUR). Eurolab4HPC funding is only for academic beneficiaries, e.g., universities, publicly funded research centers. The company partner will either co-fund the transfer project at the university, provide in-kind contributions, or invest its own work. During the review process, TTP proposals with a cash contribution from the company partner will be preferred.

After being selected for a grant, the grantee’s organisation will sign a subcontracting agreement with Eurolab4HPC. This subcontract will clarify what tasks the organization will perform to be entitled to the 45 000 EUR TTP grant. The Eurolab4HPC grant will amount to 45 000 EUR excl. VAT and will be paid upon receival of an invoice from the grantee’s institution. A public summary of the activity will be published after the TTP completion.

Only companies with business activities and/or physical sites in European Union or Associated States are eligible as technology transfer partners. However, the actual collaborating company department does not necessarily have to be located itself in these countries. The research institution and the company are responsible for entering into a bilateral contract on the technology transfer IPR issues.

The evaluation of the project proposals will be done by at least two external independent experts selected by the steering committee under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), and without conflict of interest with the proposers. The evaluation process will be composed of five steps: (i) eligibility check, (ii) review by external experts, (iii) consensus meeting chaired by the partner in charge of the call, (iv) decision to grant the best proposals by the steering committee, (v) feedback about the outcome of the evaluation process to all the proposers. All applicants will receive information about the outcome of their application by 1 September 2019.

See the attached instructions and proposal template for more details. The proposals have to be submitted via the Eurolab4HPC website no later than on 1 July 2019. The funding period after proposal acceptance is expected to start at the earliest on 1 September 2019.

Funded projects

Title	Team
Fast Virtual SoC	UPC	Ramon Canal, Pablo Fernandez	Fast Virtual SoC Ramon Canal, Pablo Fernandez UPC Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and Beidou, constitute a potentially interoperable and coordinated infrastructure, supporting in a vital way most industrial and economic aspects of our society. From farming and mining, to measurement and navigation; GNSS has become a key infrastructure. Despite the extensive use, GNSS is still underperforming in certain conditions. Among those, the presence of high‐rise buildings (or mountains); as well as, weather conditions. These factors reduce the precision of the localization and; thus, can compromise the system that it trusting those values. The large majority of the systems are autonomous. Thus, they have a build in GNSS system. Developing and prototyping those systems is costly in terms of time and money. Similarly, the high competitiveness of the market allows a narrow error between the (embedded) system designed and the final product. Albora Technologies is an SME targeted to develop novel GNSS processing mechanisms that increase the reliability and precision of the GNSS readings. Embedding these functionalities into hardware requires a precise evaluation of the hardware resources needed before prototyping takes place. While this methodology is common in larger companies, SMEs do not typically have (or can afford) this methodology. UPC’s VirtuOS research group has been developing emulation and virtualization platforms for more than 10 years generating two patents [1] [2]. Both are currently commercially exploited through the Ludium Lab start‐up (http://www.ludiumlab.es/, spin‐off of the aforementioned research group). Currently, the emulation of SoCs (including cell phones and gaming consoles) is commercially available for cross‐platform online gaming (Sorastream). Consequently, through this TTP, UPC has adapted the core infrastructure of emulation to a GPS SoC. In particular, the GNSS application are data intensive and it requires real‐time processing and expensive algorithms to precisely define the position. The transferred virtual SoC will allow ALBORA to perform a fast evaluation of their future platforms without the need of the real hardware, while being able to develop new positioning algorithms and demonstrate their effectiveness and performance needs.