CaSToRC – Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center, The Cyprus Institute

The Cyprus Institute is a non-profit research and educational institution with scientific and technological focus. It is issue-oriented, emphasizing international collaborations and cross-disciplinary research and education; the building blocks of its development are research centers that address challenging problems both at the regional and international levels. The research centers will be followed with the establishment of a graduate and undergraduate college. The Institute operates under the aegis of the Cyprus Research and Educational Foundation (CREF), which is governed by a Board of Trustees comprising leading personalities of the international academic, political and business world. The Government of Cyprus has been generous in its support of the Cyprus Institute, viewing its establishment and advancement as important to its overall policy of transforming Cyprus into a regional centre for research and education and in implementing the EU-Lisbon strategy.

The Computation based Science and Technology Research Centre (CaSToRC), the third research centre launched by the Cyprus Institute, is developed in close partnership with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) of the University of Illinois. The center has also signed a collaboration agreement with JSC in April 2009. It is geared to become a regional HPC center for the Eastern Mediterranean starting with the installation of a Tier-2 machine in the tens of Teraflop/s scale in mid-2010, to be followed by a Tier-1 system in the hundreds of Teraflop/s range in 2013. The regional role of CaSToRC is being implemented within an FP7 support project creating a user community base of its operation in 2010. CaSToRC has started educational related activities by coordinating an ATLANTIS project that aims to attract young talents to education in Simulation Sciences. In mid 2010 a series of HPC training events in the Eastern Mediterranean region (including Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria) are planned and a computational science PhD program will start in 2010 in collaboration with the University of Illinois. CaSToRC is collaborating with the University of Cyprus (UCY), the leading research University in Cyprus, in Computer Science, Physics and Bio-informatics. CaSToRC has started activities in Lattice QCD complementing the group at UCY, programming on GPUs and acceleration technologies, visualization of climate data and cultural heritage and data repositories for climate data and cultural heritage.

In PRACE-1IP CaSToRC will participate in dissemination, outreach and training activities targeting in particular the Eastern Mediterranean region. It will host a PRACE workshop open also to scientists in the region. It will develop a crossdisciplinary group on algorithms and multi-core programming in conjunction with the creation of a Joint Simulation Lab with JSC in Lattice QCD, to achieve advanced user support for the regional HPC communities With the deployment in 2010 of a JUROPA-like cluster with inhomogeneous nodes, including GPU accelerators we will contribute, in close collaboration with JSC, to prototype research in future cluster technology, thus preparing for the JSC and CaSToRC 2013 procurements in the Leadership Class. With the knowhow from our current 16 node NVidia Cluster, we shall participate in the evaluation of CUDA and OpenCL software, on our GPUenhanced systems.