HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2024-BENCHMARK-05-03: A European…

On this page · 4 sections→

01Who wins calls like this
02Call scope
03Eligibility & conditions
04Official source

Who wins calls like this

Based on projects the EU funded on the same subject in this programme.

Who leads the winning projects

Research centres63%
Universities25%
Other13%

€4.4Mtypical EU grant per project

Most common lead countriesSpain, France, Finland, Sweden, Italy

Projects funded on similar topics

GANANAEurope-India Partnership for Scientific High-Performance Computing
HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-INCO-06-01 · 2025 · Official record ↗
€5.0M
EoCoE-IIIFOSTERING THE EUROPEAN ENERGY TRANSITION WITH EXASCALE
HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-COE-01-01 · 2024 · Official record ↗
€3.0M
ESiWACE3Center of excellence for weather and climate phase 3
HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01-02 · 2023 · Official record ↗
€3.0M
SPACEScalable Parallel and distributed Astrophysical Codes for Exascale
HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01-01 · 2023 · Official record ↗
€4.0M
Q-NEKONippon-Europe Quantum Koraboreshon
HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2024-INCO-06 · 2026 · Official record ↗
€3.9M
HANAMIHpc AlliaNce for Applications and supercoMputing Innovation: the Europe - Japan collaboration
HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2022-INCO-04-01 · 2024 · Official record ↗
€5.0M
QEC4QEAQuantum Excellence Centre for Quantum-Enhanced Applications
HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-QEC-05-01 · 2025 · Official record ↗
€4.9M
DARE SGA 1Digital Autonomy for RISC-V in Europe (Specific Grant Agreement 1)
HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2024-DARE-SGA-04-01 · 2025 · Official record ↗
€102M

Organisations that keep winning here

Each one links to its EU funding record and the partners it works with: a starting list for building a consortium.

What this call funds

Expected Outcome

Enhanced evidence-based decision making through comprehensive system comparison that improves the procurement process for quantum-accelerated supercomputers (hybrid HPC-QC). This will enable more informed choices regarding the acquisition of new systems and upgrades of existing ones
Overall improved operation and fine-tuning of hybrid HPC-QC systems leading to improved performance, throughput and energy optimization, and improved end-user experience
Enhancing the competitiveness of EU quantum suppliers through transparent benchmarking of industrially relevant workflows
A unified, extensible and well-documented benchmarking framework to easily accommodate new, community-contributed benchmarks with common standards, versioning and control
A well-maintained and continuously updated benchmarking suite for QC- and hybrid HPC-QC workflows with open-source reference implementations for every benchmark, SDK-agnostic specifications and sample datasets
Active contributions to European and global standardisation on QC-, and hybrid HPC-QC benchmarking, certification and sustainability via standardisation bodies such as IEEE P7130/P7131, CEN-CENELEC JTC22-WG3, IEC/ISO JTC3 etc.

Scope

A.) Development of a benchmarking framework addressing the following aspects:

offer a fine grained and fair comparison methodology among different systems and integration approaches, i.e. all benchmarks, benchmark run rules[1] and benchmark submission rules must be designed to ensure reproducibility, repeatability and replicability of metrics on the same system, ensuring fairness and comparability of metrics across different systems
define and continuously update a precise and relevant performance metrics catalogue
standardise all benchmarking input- and output formats
collect and report all benchmarking results while offering statistically sound result analyses
ensure that all benchmarks are executable on the respective target environment(s)
offer a standardized structured workflow capturing and streamlining the entire benchmarking process
offer a standardised repository with transparent version control
provide at least one reference implementation based on an EU SDK for each benchmark
is of production-quality and ready to assess all of EuroHPC’s QC- and hybrid HPC-QC systems
provide all required templates with relevant input data to properly execute the benchmarking suite on every EuroHPC system.

The benchmarking framework along with its workflows will be realised in a software implementation that offers to the end-user a dynamic workspace for the entire workflow.

B.) Establishing a comprehensive QC- and hybrid HPC-QC benchmarking suite utilizing the framework developed in the first objective. This benchmarking suite, with its associated performance metrics, will be designed to measure and assess the performance of QC- and hybrid HPC-QC systems.

The envisioned benchmarking suite is expected to:

be generally hardware agnostic, enabling cross-device verification (e.g. via entangled-state comparisons, or distributed inner-product tests)
provide thorough documentation for developers and end-users
develop novel hybrid HPC-QC benchmarks within the following three key areas: • Throughput: capturing true end-to-end performance including queue-to-result latency, provisioning delays and data movement overhead
Latency: queue-to-solution time, end-to-end (i.e. submission-to-result)
Energy: per-shot energy, cryogenic overhead, control-electronics draw, classic-compute share, energy-to-solution (incl. all contributions, i.e. quantum-core, cryogenic, control electronics, classical compute)

catalogue relevant, well-established QC benchmarks from across the entire software stack, e.g.: • Component level/ Gate level: gate fidelities, connectivity, energy-state relaxation time, coherence (T1/T2), randomized benchmarking (RB), cross-talk RB, error-per-layered-gate (EPLG), logical-error rate, logical error scaling (Λ)
System level: Clifford-volume, cross-entropy (XEB), CLOPS/ rQOPS, MegaQuOp, GHZ-state fidelity (single shot read-out)
Software/ Compiler level: error-syndrome mapping, decoding-throughput metrics, quantum compilation volumetric benchmarks
Application layer: VQE, QAOA, MaxCut, Q-Score, quantum-enhanced ML, Monte Carlo sampling, workload-specific benchmarks, quantum application score

support of both noisy-intermediate-scale-quantum (NISQ) and fault-tolerant-quantum-computing (FTQC) regimes (e.g. logical-error rates, logical-clock rate, decoding throughput)
ensure that each benchmark produces at least one metric
define reliable and common metrics to compare different qubit modalities, as well as the depth of the HPC-QC integration based on pre-defined criteria (e.g. efficiency)
ensure the scalability of each benchmark by identifying relevant scale parameters

Proposals should provide a thorough justification for the selection of each benchmark and performance metric, clearly explaining how they align with the specific requirements and priorities of the European HPC-QC landscape. The inclusion or integration of existing benchmarks under the umbrella of this initiative is clearly foreseen, provided there are prior agreements with the benchmark owners and compatibility with licensing conditions.

The proposal must also outline a clear IP plan and licensing strategy under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL-1.2) to safeguard openness and promoting European industrial uptake enabling first exploitation within EU- and Participating States.

The project will also propose and maintain a detailed strategic development roadmap for the action, which:

anticipates future developments in QC and hybrid HPC-QC, including emerging technologies
foresees the hardware agnostic and hardware inclusive support of hybrid HPC-QC systems

The consortium will actively engage with industry and research communities through workshops, working groups, and feedback loops to receive continuous feedback ensuring that all benchmarks are relevant and up to date.

Requirements:

The proposal shall take into consideration the state of the art of development quantum computing benchmarking
Define a mechanism to monitor the benchmarking framework and pool appropriate existing benchmark suites, relevant for architectures of all participating HPC-QC centres for deployment in a common data repository
The benchmarking framework and the encompassing benchmarking suite will be made available to the user communities under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).

[1] run rules define required and forbidden hardware, software, optimization, tuning, and procedures.

Eligibility & conditions+

General conditions

1. Admissibility Conditions: Proposal page limit and layout

The conditions are described in the General Annex A of the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2023-2025.

The page limit of the application is 70 pages.

2. Eligible Countries

described in Annex B of the Work Programme General Annexes.

A number of non-EU/non-Associated Countries that are not automatically eligible for funding have made specific provisions for making funding available for their participants in Horizon Europe projects. See the information in the Horizon Europe Programme Guide.

3. Other Eligible Conditions

The conditions are described in the General Annex B of the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2023-2025.

In order to achieve the expected outcomes, and safeguard the Union’s strategic assets, interests, autonomy, and security, participation in this topic is limited to legal entities established in Member States, associated countries, to Horizon Europe and EuroHPC JU Participating States. Proposals including legal entities which are not established in these countries[[Albania, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Türkiye, United Kingdom, all countries that automatically eligible for funding under Horizon Europe as provided in list-3rd-country-participation_horizon-euratom_en.pdf (V3.5 – 20.08.2025).]] will be ineligible.

This decision has been taken on the grounds that, in the area of research covered by this topic, EU open strategic autonomy is particularly at stake. It is important to avoid a situation of technological dependency on a non-EU source, in a global context that requires the EU to take action to build on its strengths, and to carefully assess and address any strategic weaknesses, vulnerabilities and high-risk dependencies which put at risk the attainment of its ambitions.

4. Financial and operational capacity and exclusion

The criteria are described in Annex C of the Work Programme General Annexes.

5a. Evaluation and award: Award criteria, scoring and thresholds

The procedure is described in General Annex F of the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2023-2025.

The granting authority can fund a maximum of one project.

The criteria are are described in Annex D of the Work Programme General Annexes.

5b. Evaluation and award: Submission and evaluation processes

The criteria are described in of the General Annex D of the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2023-2025.

5c. Evaluation and award: Indicative timeline for evaluation and grant agreement

The criteria are described in Annex F of the Work Programme General Annexes.

6. Legal and financial set-up of the grants

As an exception from General Annex G of the Horizon Europe Work Programme, the EU-funding rate for eligible costs in grants awarded by the JU for this topic will be up to 50% of the eligible costs.

The rules are described in General Annex G of the of the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2023-2025.

Specific conditions

The documents are described in General Annex E of the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2023-2025.

Application and evaluation forms and model grant agreement (MGA):

Application form templates — the application form specific to this call is available in the Submission System

Standard application form (HE RIA, IA)

Standard application form (HE RIA IA Stage 1) 

Standard application form (HE RIA IA Stage 1 BLIND)

Standard application form (HE CSA) 

Standard application form (HE CSA Stage 1) 

Standard application form (HE CSA Stage 1 BLIND)

Standard application form (HE RI) 

Standard application form (HE PCP) 

Standard application form (HE PPI) 

Standard application form (HE COFUND) 

Standard application form (HE FPA) 

Standard application form (HE MSCA PF) 

Standard application form (HE MSCA DN) 

Standard application form (HE MSCA SE) 

Standard application form (HE MSCA COFUND) 

Standard application form (HE MSCA COFUND CE)

Standard application form (HE ERC STG) 

Standard application form (HE ERC COG) 

Standard application form (HE ERC ADG) 

Standard application form (HE ERC POC) 

Standard application form (HE ERC SYG) 

Standard application form (HE EIC PATHFINDER CHALLENGES) 

Standard application form (HE EIC PATHFINDER OPEN) 

Standard application form (HE EIC TRANSITION) 

Standard application form (HE EIC STEP)

Standard application form (HE EIC Accelerator stage 2 - full proposal)

Standard application form (HE EIC Accelerator stage 1 - short proposal)

Evaluation form templates — will be used with the necessary adaptations 

Standard evaluation form (HE RIA, IA) 

Standard evaluation form (HE CSA) 

Standard evaluation form (HE RIA, IA and CSA Stage 1) 

Standard evaluation form (HE RIA, IA and CSA Stage 1 BLIND)

Standard evaluation form (HE PCP PPI) 

Standard evaluation form (HE COFUND) 

Standard evaluation form (HE FPA) 

Standard evaluation form (HE MSCA) 

Standard evaluation form (HE EIC PATHFINDER CHALLENGES) 

Standard evaluation form (HE EIC PATHFINDER OPEN) 

Standard evaluation form (HE EIC TRANSITION) 

Standard evaluation form (HE EIC Accelerator stage 1 - short proposal) 

Standard evaluation form (HE EIC Accelerator stage 2 - full proposal) 

Guidance

HE Programme Guide 

Model Grant Agreements (MGA)

HE MGA 

HE Unit MGA 

Lump Sum MGA 

Operating Grants MGA 

Framework Partnership Agreement FPA 

Call-specific instructions 

Detailed budget table (HE LS) 

Information on financial support to third parties (HE) 

Information on clinical studies (HE) 

Guidance: "Lump sums - what do I need to know?"

Additional documents:

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 1. General Introduction

HE Main Work Programme 2023–2025 – 2. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 3. Research Infrastructures

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 4. Health

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 5. Culture, creativity and inclusive society

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 6. Civil Security for Society

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 7. Digital, Industry and Space

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 8. Climate, Energy and Mobility

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 9. Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 10. European Innovation Ecosystems (EIE)

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 11. Widening participation and strengthening the European Research Area

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 12. Missions

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 13. New European Bauhaus Facility (NEB)

HE Main Work Programme 2025 – 14. General Annexes

HE Main Work Programme 2023–2025 – 13. General Annexes

EIC Work Programme 2025

ERC Work Programme 2026

HE Programme Guide

HE Framework Programme 2021/695

HE Specific Programme Decision 2021/764

EU Financial Regulation 2024/2509

Decision authorising the use of lump sum contributions under the Horizon Europe Programme

Rules for Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity Assessment 

EU Grants AGA — Annotated Model Grant Agreement 

Funding & Tenders Portal Online Manual 

Funding & Tenders Portal Terms and Conditions 

Funding & Tenders Portal Privacy Statement

Official source

Confirm the current call documents and submission conditions with the funding authority.

View on EU portal ↗

Source: EU Funding & Tenders Portal · synced 2026-11-09

Who wins calls like this

Based on projects the EU funded on the same subject in this programme.

Who leads the winning projects

Research centres63%
Universities25%
Other13%

€4.4Mtypical EU grant per project

Most common lead countriesSpain, France, Finland, Sweden, Italy

Projects funded on similar topics

GANANAEurope-India Partnership for Scientific High-Performance Computing

HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-INCO-06-01 · 2025 · Official record ↗

€5.0M

EoCoE-IIIFOSTERING THE EUROPEAN ENERGY TRANSITION WITH EXASCALE

HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-COE-01-01 · 2024 · Official record ↗

€3.0M

ESiWACE3Center of excellence for weather and climate phase 3

HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01-02 · 2023 · Official record ↗

€3.0M

SPACEScalable Parallel and distributed Astrophysical Codes for Exascale

HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2021-COE-01-01 · 2023 · Official record ↗

€4.0M

Q-NEKONippon-Europe Quantum Koraboreshon

HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2024-INCO-06 · 2026 · Official record ↗

€3.9M

HANAMIHpc AlliaNce for Applications and supercoMputing Innovation: the Europe - Japan collaboration

HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2022-INCO-04-01 · 2024 · Official record ↗

€5.0M

QEC4QEAQuantum Excellence Centre for Quantum-Enhanced Applications

HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-QEC-05-01 · 2025 · Official record ↗

€4.9M

DARE SGA 1Digital Autonomy for RISC-V in Europe (Specific Grant Agreement 1)

HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2024-DARE-SGA-04-01 · 2025 · Official record ↗

€102M

Organisations that keep winning here

Each one links to its EU funding record and the partners it works with: a starting list for building a consortium.

What this call funds

Expected Outcome

Enhanced evidence-based decision making through comprehensive system comparison that improves the procurement process for quantum-accelerated supercomputers (hybrid HPC-QC). This will enable more informed choices regarding the acquisition of new systems and upgrades of existing ones
Overall improved operation and fine-tuning of hybrid HPC-QC systems leading to improved performance, throughput and energy optimization, and improved end-user experience
Enhancing the competitiveness of EU quantum suppliers through transparent benchmarking of industrially relevant workflows
A unified, extensible and well-documented benchmarking framework to easily accommodate new, community-contributed benchmarks with common standards, versioning and control
A well-maintained and continuously updated benchmarking suite for QC- and hybrid HPC-QC workflows with open-source reference implementations for every benchmark, SDK-agnostic specifications and sample datasets
Active contributions to European and global standardisation on QC-, and hybrid HPC-QC benchmarking, certification and sustainability via standardisation bodies such as IEEE P7130/P7131, CEN-CENELEC JTC22-WG3, IEC/ISO JTC3 etc.

Scope

A.) Development of a benchmarking framework addressing the following aspects:

offer a fine grained and fair comparison methodology among different systems and integration approaches, i.e. all benchmarks, benchmark run rules[1] and benchmark submission rules must be designed to ensure reproducibility, repeatability and replicability of metrics on the same system, ensuring fairness and comparability of metrics across different systems
define and continuously update a precise and relevant performance metrics catalogue
standardise all benchmarking input- and output formats
collect and report all benchmarking results while offering statistically sound result analyses
ensure that all benchmarks are executable on the respective target environment(s)
offer a standardized structured workflow capturing and streamlining the entire benchmarking process
offer a standardised repository with transparent version control
provide at least one reference implementation based on an EU SDK for each benchmark
is of production-quality and ready to assess all of EuroHPC’s QC- and hybrid HPC-QC systems
provide all required templates with relevant input data to properly execute the benchmarking suite on every EuroHPC system.

The benchmarking framework along with its workflows will be realised in a software implementation that offers to the end-user a dynamic workspace for the entire workflow.

The envisioned benchmarking suite is expected to:

be generally hardware agnostic, enabling cross-device verification (e.g. via entangled-state comparisons, or distributed inner-product tests)
provide thorough documentation for developers and end-users
develop novel hybrid HPC-QC benchmarks within the following three key areas: • Throughput: capturing true end-to-end performance including queue-to-result latency, provisioning delays and data movement overhead
Latency: queue-to-solution time, end-to-end (i.e. submission-to-result)
Energy: per-shot energy, cryogenic overhead, control-electronics draw, classic-compute share, energy-to-solution (incl. all contributions, i.e. quantum-core, cryogenic, control electronics, classical compute)

catalogue relevant, well-established QC benchmarks from across the entire software stack, e.g.: • Component level/ Gate level: gate fidelities, connectivity, energy-state relaxation time, coherence (T1/T2), randomized benchmarking (RB), cross-talk RB, error-per-layered-gate (EPLG), logical-error rate, logical error scaling (Λ)
System level: Clifford-volume, cross-entropy (XEB), CLOPS/ rQOPS, MegaQuOp, GHZ-state fidelity (single shot read-out)
Software/ Compiler level: error-syndrome mapping, decoding-throughput metrics, quantum compilation volumetric benchmarks
Application layer: VQE, QAOA, MaxCut, Q-Score, quantum-enhanced ML, Monte Carlo sampling, workload-specific benchmarks, quantum application score

support of both noisy-intermediate-scale-quantum (NISQ) and fault-tolerant-quantum-computing (FTQC) regimes (e.g. logical-error rates, logical-clock rate, decoding throughput)
ensure that each benchmark produces at least one metric
define reliable and common metrics to compare different qubit modalities, as well as the depth of the HPC-QC integration based on pre-defined criteria (e.g. efficiency)
ensure the scalability of each benchmark by identifying relevant scale parameters

The project will also propose and maintain a detailed strategic development roadmap for the action, which:

anticipates future developments in QC and hybrid HPC-QC, including emerging technologies
foresees the hardware agnostic and hardware inclusive support of hybrid HPC-QC systems

Requirements:

The proposal shall take into consideration the state of the art of development quantum computing benchmarking
Define a mechanism to monitor the benchmarking framework and pool appropriate existing benchmark suites, relevant for architectures of all participating HPC-QC centres for deployment in a common data repository
The benchmarking framework and the encompassing benchmarking suite will be made available to the user communities under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).

[1] run rules define required and forbidden hardware, software, optimization, tuning, and procedures.

A European Benchmarking Framework for hybrid quantum-classical computing

Who wins calls like this

Projects funded on similar topics

Organisations that keep winning here

What this call funds

Expected Outcome

Scope

General conditions

Specific conditions

Official source

Get told when calls like this open.

A European Benchmarking Framework for hybrid quantum-classical computing

Who wins calls like this

Projects funded on similar topics

Organisations that keep winning here

What this call funds

Expected Outcome

Scope

General conditions

Specific conditions

Official source

Get told when calls like this open.