Overview

The Cyprus Institute is developing a Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) that will include a Tier-1 (meaning that it will have hundreds of Teraflop computing capability) 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 modeling, 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 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.

The Research Center started its operations with the delivery of an IBM cluster with 24 nodes each containing two quad-core processors, 50 TBs net storage and a peak performance of about 1 TFlop/s. The next planned stage is the installation at the end of 2009 of a Tier-2 machine (~20 TFlop/s).

Details of Blue Water system now available

The internationally recognised expertise of NCSA in the design, development and management of High Performing Computer infrastructures, as well as in the implementation of applications and user support in a broad variety of scientific fields will be a crucial asset for the development of CaSToRC. In a recent announcement NCSA (with IBM) have released details of the Blue Waters Project supercomputing system which uses the new POWER7 chip. You can find details of the announcement in the Blue Waters Project Newsletter.