ON-THE-JOB EXPERIENCE at Arctur

11. 10. 2019 / eHealth, GOV & NGOs, Heritage, Industry, Tourism Increasing the uptake of the use HPC by micro-enterprises and SMEs through the development of tailormade HPC training programmes for both micro-enterprise and SME owner/managers and their staffs as well as for academics in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).

A two-day "ON-THE-JOB EXPERIENCE" event took place at the headquarters of Arctur d.o.o. in Nova Gorica (Slovenia) on 10th and 11th of October. The event represents the official conclusion of the training, which was held at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK earlier this year.  The main aim of the training was to train participating SME/HPC staff to design and deliver HPC training courses for and to enterprises.

Participants of the event had the opportunity to learn about real use cases of HPC usage. Additionally, they listened to a success story directly from a representative of SME, which managed to find solutions to their challenges and discovered new opportunities by using HPC technologies. The challenge of the event was technical exercises.

The event was organized within the SME/HPC European project, co-funded by Erasmus+ Programme. The project takes a pioneering step towards improving SMEs awareness about the innovative potential of HPC, by co-designing tailor-made courses delivering a coherent set of competences required for the application of HPC in SME and micro-enterprise contexts.

According to Professor Bill O’Gorman, Project Leader of the SME/HPC project, today more than ever before businesses, no matter how small or big, are fully reliant on information. The speed at which businesses can process the masses of information they have is what gives them their competitive edge over their rivals. This is known as the Digital Economy which is developing rapidly worldwide. The Digital Economy is the single most important driver of innovation, competitiveness and growth in all our regions and country states.

Every business no matter whether it is a corner shop, taxi service, consultancy, or a sophisticated medical device company is reliant on information. These masses of information and data need to be processed quickly in order to provide useful and usable business intelligence to respective owners and users of this information and data. Large computing processors are required to manipulate this information and data.

Unfortunately, most micro-enterprises and SMEs do not have the financial resources, the technology nor the human knowledge or skills to possess and operate such large computing processors.

Through the development of tailormade HPC training programmes for both micro-enterprise and SME owner/managers and their staffs as well as for academics in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) it is expected that there will be a significant increase in the uptake of the use HPC by micro-enterprises and SMEs. This increase in uptake will contribute to the competitiveness of industry in Europe.

Project website: https://www.smehpc.eu/