At the meeting of the Council of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) on Thursday, 17^th of February 2022, CyI’s CaSToRC Computing Support Specialist, Dr Stelios Erotokritou, was appointed PRACE Council Secretary, starting in March 2022 and for a term of two years. Dr Stelios Erotokritou will replace Dr Florian Barberich of the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany.

In his new role, Dr Erotokritou will be responsible for assisting the PRACE Council Chair for the PRACE Council meetings, as well as attending and contributing to other high level PRACE meetings where strategic discussions and formulation of actions take place. This activity will be added to Dr Erotokritou’s long standing contributions to PRACE.

This appointment is a great success for CyI’s CaSToRC on a European level and a recognition of the quality of work and contributions being delivered by the CaSToRC research team involved in PRACE, especially given that Cyprus is the smallest of all nations participating in the project.

CaSToRC has been a member of PRACE since October 2008, and has participated in all PRACE-1 to PRACE-6 Implementation Projects (IP). Being part of PRACE has promoted computational science in Cyprus with research teams from Cyprus gaining access to various PRACE Tier-0 and Tier-1 calls. In the past three years, Cyprus based research groups have been awarded over 475 million core hours – equating to over 35 years of access time on the supercomputer of CyI “Cyclone”.

Particularly, in the on-going PRACE-6IP project, the activities undertaken by CaSToRC team include:

• Co-leader of “Work Package 2: Sustainability and Development of Research Infrastructure (RI)” and Co-leader of “Work Package 3: Communication, Dissemination, Outreach and Events”.
• Engages in “Work Package 7: Applications Enabling and Support”, in Application Benchmarking activities and supporting users towards improving the performance and scaling of applications for them to be able to run on Tier-0 system.
• Provision of consultancy through an awarded PRACE SHAPE+ project to support an SME (Offshore Monitoring Ltd) to develop their code and use HPC in their work processes.
• Coordinates one of the projects of PRACE-6IP Work Package 8: Forward-looking Software Solution.

PRACE mission is to enable high-impact scientific discovery and engineering research and development across all disciplines to enhance European competitiveness for the benefit of society. PRACE seeks to realise this mission by offering world class computing and data management resources and services through a peer review process. Additionally, via the PRACE Implementation Projects, PRACE supports users and user communities through training, porting, scaling and optimizing their applications to fully exploit the capabilities of the PRACE systems. PRACE also seeks to strengthen the European users of HPC in industry through various initiatives.

Dr Erotokritou received his BSc in Computer Science from the University of Cyprus. He continued his studies at University College London (UCL) with MSc studies in Networking and PhD studies in the field of Cryptography.

His PhD studies were partly funded by British Telecom (BT) and focused on Perfectly Secure Message Transmission Protocols (PSMT) and their applications. Such research looks at how one can achieve Information Security of message transmission when the imminent use of exascale and quantum computing could possibly break the security of current cryptographic algorithms which are based on unproven assumptions and computational difficulty. Instead, PSMT is based on mathematical proofs and achieves security which (when implemented correctly) can never be broken. Furthermore, his studies also looked at the feasibility of implementing (beyond theory) such protocols on networks which exist in the real world - such as the Internet.

Dr Erotokritou joined The Cyprus Institute in September 2011 and has been working for the PRACE Implementation Projects from the beginning, as well as contributing to other projects - such as LinkSCEEM, VI-SEEM and EXDCI-2. He is currently PRACE-5IP WP3 co-leader and the managing coordinator for the CaSToRC Resource Allocation Committee.