INCOBRA - Increasing International Science, Technology and Innovation Cooperation between Brazil and the European Union

On April 24th INCOBRA held its twelfth webinar "International Cooperation on High Performance Computing.  The FETHPC-01-2018 H2020 call".

After a brief introduction about the scope of the webinar, Chiara Davalli (EBN) provided an overview about INCOBRA project and its initiatives in support of EU-BR STI cooperation.

Presentation 1. Chiara Davalli, EBN

Luciana Lenhari (UNICAMP) presented the INCOBRA Action Plan on Green ENergy, as this is one of the priority areas mentioned in the FETHPC-01-2018 call.

Presentation 2. Luciana Lenhari, UNICAMP

Dario Mazzella (META Group, Fet2rin coordinator) spoke about FET projects and the importance of addressing the impact dimension of these projects already at proposal stage. He provided some concrete advices and presented the FET2RIN support services to FET projects.

Presentation 3. Dario Mazzella, META Group

Dr. Carlos Oliveira (Ministro-Conselheiro Sociedade de Infomaçao e Mercado Digital, Delegação da União Europeia no Brasil) and Juan Pelegrin (European Commission, DG CONNECT) presented the Horizon 2020 open call “International Cooperation on HPC” which aims to develop strategic partnership in High Performance Computing with Brazil and Mexico to advance the work on HPC applications in domains of common interest.

The experts particularly focussed on the cooperation with Brazil  which focusses on developing state-of-the-art HPC applications in domains of common interest, such as in eHealth and drug design (e.g., related to diseases such as Zika and Dengue) or energy (e.g., renewables or management of natural resources). Proposals should put emphasis on application development towards exascale performance, develop codes, algorithms, other software tools, big data analytics, and hardware where appropriate. 

A few take home messages we got from them:

1. Make sure you have 2 Brazilian organizations on board
2. Make sure that the Brazilian partners have secured their funding from Brazilian organizations (evidence needed > a letter from the funding body duly signed and stamped). For previous HPC projects the EC has granted €4milion budgets. In the FETHPC-01-2018 call the European budget is €2milion, therefore Brazilian partners are expected to raise an quivalent amount in Brazil. Get in touch with CONFAP to know how to approach FAPs (INCOBRA Factsheet #5 FAPS GUIDELINES).
3. Be ambitious!The EC expects proposals to push advanced exascale performance.

Presentation 4. Juan Pelegrin, European Commission -DG CONNECT

A final comment was raised by the EC: Brazilian experts are invited to apply on H2020 portal to become part of the pool of experts/evaluators the EC work with in the evaluation phase of the received proposals. Register here!

We recommend you to check the webinar recordings as several comments have been raised by our experts regarding the call itself and the participation of Brazilian partners. Access the recording here.

Should you need any further information please contact the INCOBRA helpdesk.