The Cyprus Institute is developing a Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) that will include a Tier-1 high-performance computing (HPC) facility. CaSToRC aspires to cultivate the use of high performance computing in Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean region and to serve the needs for HPC and data intensive computing in fields such as climate and environmental modeling, fluid dynamics and heat transfer, high-energy and plasma physics, materials science, chemistry, 3D visualization, computational biology and financial and economic modeling. A very important component in the planning of CaSToRC is the development of research activities and educational programs in computational science and engineering.

Development of CaSToRC

CaSToRC is being developed in close and far reaching partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in particular with its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

The primary goals of the CaSToRC are four-fold:

• To create a research program of international caliber in computational science, engineering and underlying areas of scientific computing.
• To support the research missions of the other CyI Research Centers.
• To be a catalyst for the development of and education in computation-based science and technology in Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean region.
• To provide adequate computing resources to enable Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean research community to pursue forefront computing-related research.

Research

As well as providing computational support to all CyI Research Centers, CaSToRC is actively pursuing its own research program in computational science and related areas. The expertise of CaSToRC covers, among others, the areas of visualization, parallel processing, code optimization, new architectures and High Performance Computing for scientific applications.

Currently there are several research areas within the Center, including:

• Computational particle physics based on Lattice QCD on GPU Architectures
• Computational Fluid Dynamics methods for scientific and engineering applications, including climate modeling and turbulent mixing
• Graph Partitioning Methods for Scientific Computing Applications
• Visualization of scientific data and Cultural Heritage
• Atomistic and multi-scale modeling of micro/nano-flows and materials
• Development of  HPC algorithms for more efficient massively parallel computations

The LinkSCEEM project

LinkSCEEM ('Linking Scientific Computing in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean') is a Support Action funded by the European Commission (DG-INFSO). It is coordinated by CyI and seven partners (NCSA, JSC,  SARA, CSCS, IUCC, SESAME and GRNET). It focuses on regional HPC relevant for the development of CaSToRC.

Joint research with IBM

In February 2009, The Cyprus Institute signed an agreement with IBM aimed at establishing a strategic partnership to pursue world-leading research in computational science and HPC. The research agenda will initially include multi-scale simulation of materials for green technologies (also known as environmental technologies) and green Data Center design, data analysis  of complex, massive data from physical sciences, and HPC in Financial and Business Modeling. Additional areas will be considered at a later stage.