The goal of the project is to develop an extremely fast but compact processor, with supercomputer performances, for pattern recognition, data reduction and interpretation. The proposed hardware features flexibility for potential applications in a wide range of fields, from triggering in high energy physics to DNA sequence alignment. In general, any artificial intelligence application based on massive pattern recognition could largely benefit from the foreseen architecture, provided data are suitably prepared and formatted. To this end we propose the design and the production of a standard-cell CMOS chip in a deep sub-micron commercial process. This chip, based on associative memories (AM), will be able to process at very high rate large amounts of data, like for example the information coming from high-energy physics tracking detectors. The designed AM chips will be paired with an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) on dedicated processing boards which will perform high-level analyses on the filtered data at unprecedented speed. The primary aim of the FastTrack project is to demonstrate that this processing unit can perform online track reconstruction of full events at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in its High-Luminosity Phase (HL-LHC), when the instantaneous luminosity of the accelerator will be increased by almost a factor ten, to reach several units of 1034 cm-2s-1. Indeed, under these conditions the capability of the LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS to pre-select interesting events inside an enormous background cannot be maintained with the use of standard readout and trigger systems, and online tracking becomes mandatory. Both collaborations plan to include this feature in their respective upgrade programs. This project will allow initiating a strong collaboration between ATLAS and CMS in this domain, resulting in the development of a generic AM-based hardware device usable by both experiments. Finally, we plan to exploit the potential of these new devices in non-HEP applications. In particular, DNA sequence alignment is a complex procedure where the use of an AM chip might lead to significant improvements. Demonstrating this would be a significant breakthrough in the field, and will open new scientific directions for AM-chip technology dissemination.