This document has the following three objectives:
1. To describe the development and optimisation activities that have taken place until M18 towards the successful migration of the AERO pilots to the AERO envisioned platforms.
2. To present the plans for the development of the AERO pilots during the second part of the project.
3. To report initial performance evaluation results. Unfortunately, as the Rhea platform is delayed, runs have been executed on alternative ARM-based platforms, most notably an NVIDIA GraceHopper platform, as well as x86_64 platforms that serve as baseline.