Cy-Tera

The Cy-Tera project aims at creating a research facility including a High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure supporting cutting-edge scientific applications, including computational science research, associated user support and training programs. It will constitute a major step in the development of the Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) of the Cyprus Institute (CyI).

The Cy-Tera facility will be the first facility at multi-Teraflop/s level in Cyprus, serving the needs of CyI and its partners (The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, the University of Cyprus, and the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) for frontier research applications with scientific and social importance.

The principal objectives of the Cy-Tera project are:

• To set up a Tier-1 facility based on multiple core architecture with scalable design.
• To provide computational resources and associated user support for the CyI research thrusts as well as for the research activities of its partner institutions. This will notably include applications in climate modelling, simulations of desalination systems, digital cultural heritage, computational physics and biology, computational fluid dynamics, materials modelling as well as basic research in scientific computing methods. In addition to the above applications, the Cy-Tera facility may accommodate an extended range of applications in the future according to the user demands and on the basis of a peer-review process for research proposals.
• To develop a portfolio of research activities in computational science, including research at the interface of computer science and scientific computing, thus promoting cross-disciplinary research regarding new computer architectures and software engineering. These activities will include scientific computing programming approaches tailored for specialized applications, improved parallel programming environment and software tools for enhancing scalability in parallel applications. GPUs and other accelerator-based designs are also part of Cy-Tera’s research agenda.