COVID-19 pandemic manifested the vulnerability of industries, the unpredictability of external shocks and evidenced that traditional solutions do not suffice. Societal transformation and appropriate innovation models along with new technical solutions are seen as important pillars in solving environmental problems. Today, seeds of this societal and industrial transformation exist. Digital communities gather around open-source innovative projects, makers create collectives of professionals, artists and tinkerers in tier-places co-create solutions. SMEs, looking for more sustainable new business models, are inventing circular and sense-making businesses in various territories. User-centric, agile co-creation is a very well known development practice that can be expanded to the whole manufacturing chain. The transition to a low carbon, resource efficient, circular and sustainable bioeconomy, with its technological potentials and proven applications and initiatives like the New European Bauhaus offers solutions to the challenges society is facing today. LAUDS factories is an innovative concept aiming to create small, versatile factories in local and urban areas to co-create and produce customised products in small series. It seeks to incorporate innovative and active resiliency capabilities at production and supply chain levels to support a green, circular, and digital transformation. It can enable artists, creatives, and entrepreneurs to test new ideas and products, and reduce the carbon footprint by cutting transportation costs and time. It also aims to create a more personalised experience for customers, enhance their satisfaction, loyalty, and dynamize the job market. The key exploitable results include a sustainable model for local manufacturing, an updated digital product passport for transparency, and innovation services for makerspaces SMEs and creatives.

Five leading European supercomputing centres are committed to develop, within their respective national programs and service portfolios, a set of services that will be federated across a consortium. The work will be undertaken by the following supercomputing centres, which form the High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform of the Human Brain Project (HBP): ▪ Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) in Spain, ▪ The Italian supercomputing centre CINECA, ▪ The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS, ▪ The Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, and ▪ Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), France (joining in April 2018). The new consortium will be called Fenix and it aims at providing scalable compute and data services in a federated manner. The neuroscience community is of particular interest in this context and the HBP represents a prioritised driver for the Fenix infrastructure design and implementation. The Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the HBP (ICEI) project will realise key elements of this Fenix infrastructure that are targeted to meet the needs of the neuroscience community. The participating sites plan for cloud-like services that are compatible with the work cultures of scientific computing and data science. Specifically, this entails developing interactive supercomputing capabilities on the available extreme computing and data systems. Key features of the ICEI infrastructure are: ▪ Scalable compute resources; ▪ A federated data infrastructure; and ▪ Interactive Compute Services providing access to the federated data infrastructure as well as elastic access to the scalable compute resources. The ICEI e-infrastructure will be realised through a coordinated procurement of equipment and R&D services. Furthermore, significant additional parts of the infrastructure and R&D services will be realised within the ICEI project through in-kind contributions from the participating supercomputing centres.

This research brings together the complementary expertise of our consortium members to gain a better understanding of the physics in hydraulic fracturing (HF) with the final goal to optimize HF practices and to assess the environmental risks related to HF. This requires the development and implementation of reliable models for HF, scaled laboratory tests and available on-site data to validate these models. The key expertise in our consortium is on modelling and simulation of HF and all partners involved pursue different computational approaches. However, we have also some partners in our consortium which focus on scaled laboratory tests and one company which can provide on-site data. The choice of the best model for HF still remains an open question and this research promises to quantify uncertainties in each model and finally provide a guideline how to choose the best model with respect to a specific output parameter. The final objective is to employ these models in order to answer some pressing questions related to environmental risks of HF practices, including 1. How does HF interact with the natural fractures that intersect the shale seam?’ 2. How does the fracture network from a previous stage of HF treatment affect the fracture network evolution in succeeding, adjacent stages? 3. What are the requirements to constrain fractures from propagating to the adjacent layers of confining rock? The exchange and training objectives are to: 4. Enhance the intersectoral and interdisciplinary training of ERs and ESRs in Computational Science, Mining Geotechnics, Geomechanics, Modeling and Simulation 5. Strengthen, quantitatively and qualitatively, the human potential in research and technology in Europe 6. Advance the scientific contribution of women researchers in this area dominated by male 7. Create synergies with other EU projects 8. Enable and support all ESRs/ERs to keep contact with international community in the sense of training and transfer of knowledge