Seagate is a full member / Corporate European organisation. These are the benefits Seagate have seen as an industry participant being part of the ETP4HPC:

1. Better awareness of the market ecosystem for European HPC: It was important for us to get a sense of the main players in the different sub-sectors within HPC in the technology and services provision in Europe. ETP4HPC has helped to develop that over the course of our participation over many years.
    
2. Helping to be part of setting strategic direction for EC HPC R&D: This was mainly through our work for the Strategic Research Agenda in H2020. The SRA provided key inputs to the calls for proposals. There were many working groups to generate the SRAs that worked on various important technical topics such as architecture, energy, storage, etc. Also the Research projects needed to be aligned to the SRA, which would be drafted with our input – which is one of the necessary requirements for all research projects. As a note, the definition of this work will now change with the upcoming FP9 programme, ETP4HPC is expected to continue to take a very active role in technical road mapping. ETP4HPC will now observe the results of the SRA work and the research projects in terms of impact, market adoption for research outcomes fostering sustainability, etc and learn from it– as we head into FP9.
    
3. Helps to obtain early insights into upcoming EC plans and roadmap in HPC R&D, and, ETP4HPC is a major forum to debate and discuss that and provides inputs into the EC to shape those strategies. For example, EuroHPC is a major topic to follow these days.
    
4. Directly engaging with potential partners & customers: ETP4HPC provided a great forum for us to engage with potential partners and customers in the EU. The ETP4HPC includes the leading technology vendors in the HPC space as well as the biggest HPC facilities in Europe.
    
5. Research projects consortia: ETP4HPC is a extremely valuable forum to create favourable networking conditions for consortia formation to go into EC funded research projects. It is also a great forum to interact with many HPC R&D projects, many of the key members being part of ETP4HPC.
    
6. Interactions with the global community through workshops and events organised by the ETP4HPC, for example the ETP4HPC BoF at Supercomputing conference. ETP4HPC BoF’s have been extremely well attended by the major players in the Americas, Japan, etc. You should be able to get more information on them from the website.
    
7. Provides inroads and leads into other areas such as Big Data and IoT communities in Europe that may be of interest for you. For example there is a major exercise, initiated by ETP4HPC and BDVA going on these days to provide better interlock between HPC, Big Data and IoT communities in Europe. Such cross cutting work is expected to be a major theme going forward also facilitated by EXDCI2, continuation of the EXDCI support action (https://exdci.eu/).
    
8. Last but not the least, it’s a great general networking forum where we have had the fortune of working alongside very committed and clever people in HPC and related areas.