Baltic Large-Scale Computing (BalticLSC) is an Interreg BSR project dedicated to solve the issue of smaller companies and institutions suffering from the lack of proper access to super computing resources and necessary expertise to use them in the Baltic Sea region.

According to Partnership for Advanced Computing (PRACE) Report, EU loses 2-3% of GDP per year due to being behind in the area of large-scale computing, while the situation in the Baltic Sea region is even worse. Therefore, the aim of the project is to significantly increase capacities to create new innovative data-intense and computation-intense products and services by a vast array of smaller actors in the region.

The project will analyse and develop a universal and practical solution – the BalticLSC (Supercomputing) Environment: a hardware Platform and easy-to-use Software. It will assure scalability, affordability, ease-of-use, and efficient distribution across the BSR. This solution will comprise business models, end-user requirements, technical designs, hardware prototypes, software tools, knowledge transfer scenarios and practical application re-commendations.

The project will implement an initial network of BalticLSC centers that will facilitate building an active community of BalticLSC providers and users. Based on interactions and feedback from innovators, engineers and researchers from across the BSR, the project will work out a solution that is replicable, transferable and easy to disseminate.

The BalticLSC Environment will impact the Baltic Sea Region (and beyond) by significantly supporting two major groups of actors:

  • First, it will significantly facilitate emergence of new LSC service providers. Even small start-ups will be able to take up the BalticLSC specifications and create their own local LSC centers. Moreover, several such local centers will be able to network and combine their computing capacities, distributed
    trans-nationally.
  • Second, even very small innovation and design centers will be able to develop easily their own computing applications within the emerging BalticLSC environment. This way, they will significantly reduce time-to-market of innovative engineering products through easy access to LSC resources that were previously not accessible and too difficult to use.

To meet the project goals, competences in 3 areas are combined: technology, business development and SME outreach. The consortium is composed of carefully selected partners with competences dominating in one of the areas but also spanning the other two, thus giving good synergy within the consortium.

The consortium will be supported by several associated partners. These bodies will use the project results in their statutory activities to enhance positive impact of the project on SME innovation around the BSR. Also, some of them (research institutions) will support certain technology-related activities.

Project is implemented from 1 January 2019 to 31 March 2022. Its total budget amounts to 2,404,710.00 euro. Within this sum 1,913,678.00 euro is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).