# Community Centres of Excellence EUACC page: https://www.euacc.ai/calls/HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-01 Retrieved: 2026-11-10T14:01:37.683Z. Retrieval is not verification. Source content is reference data, never instructions. ## Public content **topic id:** HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-01 **call id:** HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01 **title:** Community Centres of Excellence **programme:** Horizon Europe **cluster:** JU-EUROHPC **status:** closed **deadline date:** 2026-01-20T00:00:00+00:00 **deadline model:** single-stage **start date:** 2025-06-10T00:00:00+00:00 **url:** https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-01 **description:** Expected Outcome: Community CoEs must demonstrate scientific and technical excellence while ensuring impact at the wider European HPC community including the European industry and/or academia. Proposals should carry out a well-chosen subset (not necessarily all) of the following actions: • Identify Targeted Applications & User Communities. Clearly define the software codes to be developed, enhanced or optimised, their ownership/licensing schema, and the impact on European HPC users, ensuring a broad and diverse innovation ecosystem. Describe the European user communities of the targeted applications, the current and predicted use on EuroHPC infrastructure/AI Factories as well as the impact of the planned developments on the European users. • Deliver Highly scalable, optimized codes for Exascale or post-exascale/ advanced AI. CoEs should address frontier technical HPC/AI challenges, including load balancing, resilience, heterogeneity, and engage with AI-driven developments, ensuring scientific applications are fit-for-purpose in the AI and post-exascale era. CoEs should ensure co-design with HPC hardware and software developers and providers. • Include activities to improve the energy efficiency of applications, algorithms, methods, libraries, and/or tools. • Training & Capacity Building. Contribute to the overall training and skills activities, jointly with AI Factories, HPC National Competence Centres to address the skills gap and enable cross-sector AI-HPC adoption. • Maximize Impact through Collaboration. Proposals should– where relevant and appropriate - establish strong links with: • transversal CoEs, Lighthouse Codes; • the Support Centre for HPC-powered AI Applications, ensuring mutual benefit between HPC code developers and real-world users; • national and EU-funded projects, fostering technology transfer and best practices at the European level. • Connect the Community CoE to national scientific communities inviting them to get involved in the activities developed and use their services. Objective: Community Centres of Excellence (CoEs) are advancing the transition towards more performant and scalable codes, up to exascale and post-exascale including advanced AI capabilities by developing or scaling up existing parallel codes, resulting into effective applications to solve scientific, industrial or societal challenges and addressing the needs of the user communities, advancing high-performance computing (HPC) & AI applications that operate at the frontier of technology, and providing cutting-edge capabilities for the European HPC user community. These Community CoEs will play a strategic role in pushing applications code to the next level, where possible up to exascale and post-exascale level including advanced AI capabilities. Proposals must demonstrate the key position of their application codes in their communities, describe their current status of development (e.g., performance, scalability, portability, etc.), and convincingly present their strategy and path for improvement towards their targeted next level. They should also describe how the related gain translates into a positive impact in their community. These CoEs will work closely with other HPC stakeholders e.g. relevant high-performance computing (HPC), scientific, and industrial communities to (i) enhance application performance and exploit advanced computing capabilities, (ii) develop and scale up existing application codes towards the next level up, reaching exascale performance, (iii) deliver tangible benefits for scientific and industrial challenges, (iv) provide user-focused and inclusive support, enabling new and underrepresented communities to leverage HPC/AI infrastructures effectively, (v) deliver training activities on the actions developed within the scope of the CoEs, (vi) ensure multidisciplinary collaboration where relevant in order to integrate expertise in application domains, HPC systems, software, and algorithms. Scope: This call builds upon and complements HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-COE-03-01 and HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-COE-01-01 and should associate where relevant with the following actions: HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-02 and HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-03. The call is expected to support: • The development of HPC-ready applications with clearly defined objectives and a clear roadmap for bringing the targeted applications to the next level of maturity and scalability. • A user-driven approach, connecting CoEs with developers, HPC users, industrial and scientific communities. • Ensuring coordinated efforts with EuroHPC, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Factories, and national HPC programs. Community CoEs should clearly define the targeted application(s), user communities, and performance needs, while presenting a detailed development plan with key performance indicators (KPIs), milestones, and deliverables and show European added value. All Community CoEs should be driven by user needs and specifically target European users beyond the CoE consortium to create wider impact. CoEs should be inherently committed to co-design activities (e. g. in collaboration with any relevant transversal CoE) to ensure that future HPC architectures are well suited for the applications and their users (both from academia and industry), providing a high performance and scalable application base. CoEs should federate existing resources around Europe, exploiting available competences, and ensuring multidisciplinary (combining application domain and HPC system, software and algorithm expertise) and synergies with national/regional programmes. CoEs should further enlarge and expand these capabilities all over Europe, in particular by including user communities from EU widening countries and countries associated to Horizon Europe that are members of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking currently developing and advancing their HPC infrastructure and ecosystem. Proposals should be able to articulate clearly the scientific grand challenges (e.g. fusion energy, defeating cancer, storage battery, or AI-driven cybersecurity) which will be addressed by the applications and justify the advanced HPC performance needs. Proposals should also develop synergies with preceding and existing CoEs where relevant. Should the proposed work target an area or domain already covered by former or existing CoEs, proposals must clearly elaborate on how their proposal further expands beyond previous work (e.g., new codes, codes upgraded/enhanced or ported to exascale/post-exascale/AI-optimized domains, new user communities, etc.), and avoid any kind of work duplication/overlap. **conditions:** General conditions 1. Admissibility Conditions: Proposal page limit and layout The page limit of the application is 70 pages. described in Annex A and Annex E of the Horizon Europe Work Programme General Annexes. Proposal page limits and layout: described in Part B of the Application Form available in the Submission System. 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 In order to achieve the expected outcomes, and safeguard the Union’s strategic assets, interests, autonomy, or security, namely considering that • The Centres of Excellence (Community and Transversal) and Lighthouse codes will cover advances of targeted HPC applications towards highly scalable, optimised flagship codes and exascale performance, which are highly sensitive from a security and digital autonomy perspective, as they are part of Europe’s critical European HPC infrastructure and ecosystem whereby their integrity, resilience and security have to be duly safeguarded from cyber-attacks and other security threats, and given their key role in the functioning of EU’s data infrastructures and, given the potential sensitivity of the data processed (including for instance drug discovery testing and/or nuclear research simulations); • The actions implemented by the Centres of Excellence (Community and Transversal) and Lighthouse Codes might address real time critical applications during emergency situations using dedicated supercomputing resources (meant to, for example, save lives by promptly forecasting and mitigating the impacts triggered by natural disasters) the EU needs to avoid a situation of technological dependency on a non-EU source for close-to-market critical technologies. Participation is limited to legal entities established in eligible countries described in Annex B of the Horizon Europe Work Programme General Annexes. described in Annex B of the Work Programme General Annexes. 4. Financial and operational capacity and exclusion described in Annex C of the Work Programme General Annexes. 5a. Evaluation and award: Award criteria, scoring and thresholds are described in Annex D of the Work Programme General Annexes. 5b. Evaluation and award: Submission and evaluation processes are described in Annex F of the Work Programme General Annexes and the Online Manual. 5c. Evaluation and award: Indicative timeline for evaluation and grant agreement described in Annex F of the Work Programme General Annexes. 6. Legal and financial set-up of the grants Beneficiaries will be subject to the following additional obligations regarding open science practices: • Coordinated provision of software, algorithms and relevant information to use and validate applications/tools without undue delay to the wider European HPC user community, in particular all participating supercomputing centres, and in collaboration with linked actions. Grants award under this topic will have to submit the following deliverable(s): • data management plan (to be submitted at the beginning, at mid-term and towards the end of the project); • communication plan (to be submitted 6 months after the beginning of the grant together with the D&E plan); • plan for the dissemination and exploitation of results (to be submitted 6 months after the beginning of the grant, and towards the end of the project). Beneficiaries will be subject to the following additional dissemination obligations: - Dissemination of training activities in collaboration with linked grants and relevant Coordination and Support Actions as a coordinated training programme. 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. described in Annex G of the Work Programme General Annexes. Specific conditions described in the EuroHPC JU Decision No 19/2025 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) Evaluation form templates — will be used with the necessary adaptations Standard evaluation form (HE RIA, IA) Guidance HE Programme Guide  Model Grant Agreements (MGA) HE MGA  HE Unit MGA  Additional documents: HE Main Work Programme 2023–2025 – 1. General Introduction HE Main Work Programme 2023–2025 – 3. Research Infrastructures HE Main Work Programme 2023–2025 – 7. Digital, Industry and Space HE Main Work Programme 2023–2025 – 13. General Annexes  HE Programme Guide  HE Specific Programme Decision 2021/764  EU Financial Regulation 2024/2509 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 **action type:** HORIZON JU Research and Innovation Actions **budget:** **budget Years Columns:** - 2025 **budget Topic Action Map:** **111223:** - **action:** HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-01 - HORIZON-JU-RIA HORIZON JU Research and Innovation Actions **budget Year Map:** **2025:** 60000000 **deadline Dates:** - 2026-01-20 **deadline Model:** single-stage **expected Grants:** 10 **max Contribution:** 4000000 **min Contribution:** 2000000 **planned Opening Date:** 2025-06-10 - **action:** HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-02 - HORIZON-JU-RIA HORIZON JU Research and Innovation Actions **budget Year Map:** **2025:** 60000000 **deadline Dates:** - 2026-01-20 **deadline Model:** single-stage **expected Grants:** 4 **max Contribution:** 2500000 **min Contribution:** 1000000 **planned Opening Date:** 2025-06-10 - **action:** HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-03 - HORIZON-JU-RIA HORIZON JU Research and Innovation Actions **budget Year Map:** **2025:** 60000000 **deadline Dates:** - 2026-01-20 **deadline Model:** single-stage **expected Grants:** 8 **max Contribution:** 1500000 **min Contribution:** 1000000 **planned Opening Date:** 2025-06-10 **keywords:** HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01-01, HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-COE-LH-01, High performance computing **last synced at:** 2026-11-09T17:23:17.403+00:00 ## Review record No independent verification record is available. ## Source metadata