CaSToRC maintains and supports access to various facilities which are used to support users, offer user services as well as allowing for experimentation and prototyping activities on promising technologies of the future.
Find out about these facilities below.
HPC Systems
Cyclone
Cyclone has a theoretical peak performance of 600 TFlop/s. It consists of 17 compute nodes and 16 GPU nodes and is the new production HPC system of The Cyprus Institute since its deployment in 2020.
All nodes are equipped with two Intel Xeon Gold 6248 CPUs. The GPU nodes have 4 NVIDIA Tesla V100-SXM2 32GB each. The memory on the compute nodes is 96GB and on the GPU nodes is 192GB.
The machine has a flash storage capacity of 135TB and is also connected to the 3PB HPC storage. A HDR100 Infiniband network connects all the system components.
Cyclone Specifications
Peak/Sustained Performance | ~600 TFlop/s |
Number of Nodes | 17 forty-core compute nodes 16 forty-core compute nodes, each with 4 NVidia V100 GPUs |
Processors/node | 2 twenty-core sockets per node, each is Intel Xeon Gold 6248 |
Memory/node | 192 GB memory per compute node Approximately 5 TBytes system memory |
Scratch disk storage | 135 TB NVMe Storage |
Disk storage | 3.2 PB Storage |
Node-node interconnect | HDR 100 |
accelerators | GPUs available |
OS info | OS, Compute Node: CentOS OS, Front End & Service Nodes: CentOS |
Cy-Tera (legacy 2012)
Cy-Tera was the first HPC system installed by CaSToRC. It was a hybrid CPU and GPU system of 335 TFlop/s peak performance.
Cy-Tera was one of nine strategic infrastructure projects funded by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation (RPF) to develop a national state-of-the-art computational facility.
Since its operation in May 2012, Cy-Tera has provided computational resources for more than 480 projects from Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia making the facility of regional importance. Additionally, Cy-Tera became part of the Tier-1 PRACE eco-system providing access to European researchers.
Major projects that run on Cy-Tera covered all areas of science and engineering from the Eastern Mediterranean as described by the figures below.
Distribution of big projects on Cy-Tera per country |
Distribution of big projects on Cy-Tera per scientific field |
Prototype Systems
CaSToRC has been maintaining a series of small, prototype computer systems, for developing and benchmarking codes for current and future supercomputers. These include clusters with the latest GPUs and Xeo Phi nodes. These systems are used as a development platform by CaSToRC staff, and have been instrumental in maintaining competitiveness when applying for computer time at the European level. Picture: Cluster of Intel Xeon Phis and NVIDIA K20 GPUs used for development of lattice QCD application codes. |
Visualisation and Imaging Facility
The CyI Visualization Laboratory (VisLab) allows researchers from all centers of CyI to better understand complex phenomena and visualise their data as images on large-scale and high-resolution visualization walls or other display devices. The CyI Visualization Lab occupies a dedicated area of the institute and the visualization and imaging equipment are being continuously used.
The 360 degree high resolution camera constructed at CaSToRC |
The PTM dome constructed at CaSToRC |
The Facility consists of two separate rooms, one for 3D visualization and one for RTI imaging. The facility is fully equipped. As the size of data generated from numerical simulations continues to increase, visualization is expected to play an increasingly more important role in assisting scientists to obtain insight into the simulation output.