UPC (LaCaN)
The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) is a public institution dedicated to higher education and research that specializes in the fields of architecture, science and engineering. Its schools and research centers are known, nationally and internationally, for the education and training of professionals and for research in these areas. UPC is seeks to teach high quality technical courses that are responsive to the training needs and requirements of traditional, evolving and newly-developing production sectors, including aeronautics, photonics, supercomputing, bioengineering, water and energy, all within the scope of the European Higher Education and Research Areas.
Laboratori de Càlcul Numèric (LaCaN) is a research group in the department Matemàtica Aplicada III at UPC. LaCaN is a very active group in the area of Computational Mechanics and Applied Sciences, both in high-educational training and research. It is involved in several masters and PhD programs.
LaCaN has high-quality facilities for his researchers. For instance, nowadays it has a DELL cluster for parallel and sequential computations with 50 CPUs. A part from the staff offices, a user’s room with 11 PCs is available for all PhD students.

SU (C2EC)
Swansea University has an outstanding tradition in the area of computational mechanics and finite element methods. Much of the early work on finite elements was developed at the Civil Engineering department of Swansea University led by Prof. Zienkiewicz over the 70’s and 80’s. Currently, the Civil & Computational Engineering Centre at SU boasts over 20 full time academic staff engaged in all aspects of computational mechanics. The staff have a very strong international reputation and many of its 12 senior professors are well known in the area for their numerous contributions and publications (eg. Profs. Ken Morgan, Roger Owen, Roland Lewis, Djorge Peric, Oubey Hassan, Javier Bonet and several others.) The Centre has consistently scored the maximum rating in the all the UK government Research Assessment Exercise (5*). The centre graduates over 12 PhD per year on average and many of its past graduates (over 300) now take prestigious position elsewhere in the world. The centre has extensive computational facilities with access to several supercomputers such as the BLUE_C IBM with over 1,000 processors. The Centre has a long standing tradition of training in computational mechanics at masters and doctorate levels.

ECN (GeM institute)

The research team at ECN is hosted in the GeM Institute which is recognized by the CNRS. The Institute gathers 150 researchers (including phd students) and provides all modern computing facilities (secure network with date archiving, linux cluster for computations, stereoscopic room for 3D viewing,...).
The computing network is administrated by a full time dedicated team. All non-computing facilities (email, web, firewall,...) are provided at the Institution level (Ecole Centrale de Nantes). The ECN research team involves around 10 permanent senior reseachers.
The research focus is on the eXtended Finite Element for the multi-scale analysis of materials and structures. The team is lead by Nicolas MOËS who took part in the introduction of the eXtended Finite Element Method (X-FEM) 10 years ago. The targeted applications are: fracture and damage mechanics, homogenization, stochastic finite elements.
The number of graduated PhD student in the past ten years is over 20.

ULB (BATir-SMC)
BATir-SMC is a research group of BATir which is a department of the Faculty of Engineering of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, one of the largest Belgian French-speaking University offering all the corresponding facilities in terms of scientific, pedagogical, social or cultural activities. Locally, BATir-SMC is equipped with several workstations and has a privileged access to the computers of the Computing Centre of ULB/VUB.
For more than 30 years, BATir-SMC group has developed research activities in mechanical and civil engineering always with the aim to develop reliable and industrially effective numerical methods. Today, the BATir-SMC has clearly defined 2 major activities:
•    Structural dynamics and vibro-acoustics: 2D/3D coupled vibro-acoustics for both interior and exterior domain, verification and validation of acoustic models.
•    Nonlinear structural and material mechanics: multi-scale modelling for masonry and nano-materials, homogenization of anisotropic structural material, structural optimisation of thin walled structures, advanced modelling of torsion of thin walled beams, progressive collapse of structures.
For both activities, BATir-SMC group develops several numerical methods based on advanced concepts like partition of unity, moving least squares, etc.

FFT
Free Field Technologies (FFT) occupies a leading position in the small world of computational acoustics. Founded in 1998, this belgian SME has managed to convince several large industrial groups of the value of its software developments and engineering services.  To name but a few Airbus, Rolls-Royce, Aermacchi, Honda, Renault, Peugeot Citroën Automobile, Fiat, Daimler-Chrysler, BMW, Solvay, Rieter, Hutchinson, Glaverbel, Alstom and Goodyear are for instance among its customers.
FFT has two major activities: development of a general purpose acoustics, vibro-acoustics and aero-acoustics simulation tool (ACTRAN) and provision of consulting services based on this and related software products.
FFT has a staff of 30 engineers, ten of them holding PhDs. A subsidiary was opened in Toulouse in 2007 and a representation office opened in the Japan in 2008. FFT received two important prize from the Walloon government: the Technological Innovation Award in 2005 and the Export Award in 2006.
FFT participated in numerous EC projects: MESSIAEN, TURNEX, FriendCopter, TIMPAN, CREDO (FP6 Aeroanutics), AROMA (FP5, Growth, KA Aeronautics and space), SMILE and RATIN (FP5, Growth, KA Surface Transport).  FFT coordinated MESSIAEN and AROMA.
Both FFT founders are teaching, respectively at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) where they also provide guidance to PhD students. FFT also has its own training room equipped with computers and organizes a full training program in computational acoustics for engineers and researchers from the industry.

TUM (LNM)
The Technische Universität München (TUM) has earned a high international reputation that is apparent from research collaborations with more than 140 partner Universities, and its involvement in about 150 FP-6 projects, 420 Projects financed by the German federal Ministry of Science and in 17 special research programs financed by the German Research Association (DFG).
TUM pursues a sustainable strategy of promoting high quality research and supports scientists at each stage of career development. It received the highest prize for its concept “Entrepreneurial University” in the “Excellence Initiative” competition by the German Federal and State Governments. It founded the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in order to support scientific creativity and set up Clusters of Excellence and Graduate Schools in many scientific fields. TUM's outstanding, internationally acclaimed scientists are provided with a working environment that supports the evolution of highly innovative, adventurous projects in a context of “knowledge exchange”. Research groups will benefit from the TUM International Graduate School of Science and Engineering which facilitates excellent interdisciplinary research qualifications and support PhD work in Science and Engineering.
From their arrival, through the search of national and international funding programmes to the development and the promotion of new projects, the scientists receive high quality services from the University, e.g. from the Welcome Office, Centre for Research Support and Technology Transfer, TUM Corporate Communications Centre. Gender Issues form a main focus of TUM’s strategy and a range of measures have been implemented like a Family Care Structural Fund, a Gender Consultant, an Incentive Fund for new gender related projects.
The Institute for Computational Mechanics (LNM) is a research group in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. It has been founded in 2003 and is meanwhile one of the most active research groups in Computational Mechanics in Germany, both in high-level international research as well as high-educational training. It is involved in several master and PhD programs (the head of the group, Prof. Wall, is among others one of the principal investigators of TUM-IGSSE, dean for research of the largest department of TUM and recently became founding director of the new Munich School of Engineering).
Research at LNM is devoted to application motivated fundamental research and spans a wide area – both in methodical aspects as well as in fields of applications. A large portion of its’ research is devoted to advanced techniques as dealed with in this proposal.
Facilities at LNM are excellent and all brand new. Every co-worker and PhD student has a personal quad-core machine and the group has two own parallel computing cluster. It has two training rooms for students with together 50 workstations and is well connected and closely tied to two high performance computing centers in Germany (LRZ and HLRS).
Currently the LNM team consists of 1 full professor, 1 junior research group leader (Emmy-Noether group funded by DFG), about 30 scientific staff members (of which 5 are post-docs) and two secretaries.

IST
Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) is the largest school of engineering in Portugal, with long tradition in teaching, and excellence in research, innovation and training activities. Its mission is to contribute for the development of the science, economy and society by promoting a higher degree of education in the areas of Science, Engineering and Technology at the undergraduate and graduate levels and by delivering highly qualified professionals in the public and private sector.
IST mission reflects the three activities that define the concept of a modern university: Education, Research & Development and links with the modern society. Today IST has about 8500 undergraduate students and over 1500 graduate students in different areas of studies. The faculty includes over 700 Professors with Ph.D. in different areas of specialization.
With two conveniently located campuses, (Alameda in Lisbon and Taguspark in Oeiras), IST consists of ten Departments and one Autonomous Section that are responsible for teaching Undergraduate and Postgraduate Programmes.
The scientific activities are developed in research institutes, some of them of excellence, in which working groups develop research in specific subjects within its scientific area. 
The research expertise of the group at IST participating in this project (the Structural Analysis research group) is centred on the development of computational techniques for the solution of problems on Solid Mechanics, using non-conventional finite element formulations and other discretization techniques.
10 PhD projects have been completed in the last 10 years within the Structural Analysis research group.