The EXCESS project aims at providing radically new energy execution models forming foundations for energy-efficient computing paradigms that will enable two orders of magnitude improvements in energy efficiency for computing systems. A holistic approach that involves both hardware and software aspects together has the best chances to successfully address the energy efficiency problem and discover innovative solutions. EXCESS proposed models will try to describe and bridge embedded processors models with general purpose ones. EXCESS will take a holistic approach and will introduce novel programming methodologies to drastically simplify the development of energy-aware applications that will be energy-portable in a wide range of computing systems while preserving relevant aspects of performance.The EXCESS project is going to be driven by the following technical components that are going to be developed during EXCESS:• Complete software stacks (including programming models, libraries/algorithms and runtimes) for energy- efficient computing.• Uniform, generic development methodology and prototype software tools that enable leveraging additional optimisation opportunities for energy-efficient computing by coordinating optimisation knobs at the different levels of the system stack, enabled by appropriate modelling abstractions at each level.• Configurable energy-aware simulation systems for future energy-efficient architectures.The EXCES consortium unites Europe's leading experts in both high-performance computing and embedded computing. The consortium consists of world-class research centres and universities (Chalmers, LIU, UiT), a high performance computing centre (HLRS at USTUTT), and a European embedded multi-core SME (Movidius), and has the required expertise to accomplish the ambitious but realistic goals of EXCESS.