The Cyprus Institute (CYI)

The Cyprus Institute (CyI) is a non-profit science and technology educational and research institution based in Cyprus. The Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) is one of four research centers within the Cyprus Institute. CaSToRC pursues research in computational sciences, currently focusing on scientific computing and novel computer architectures, climate modelling, computational biology, computational engineering, quantum computing, nuclear and particle physics, data-intensive applications, and artificial intelligence. It has a close partnership with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as a collaboration agreement with the Jülich Supercomputing Centre for the promotion of common activities including a joint Simulation Lab in Nuclear and Particle Physics.    

In 2020, CaSToRC was designated as the National High-Performance Computing (HPC) Competence Center of Cyprus (under the EuroCC project). CaSToRC aims to cultivate the education and use of HPC, Simulation and Data Science in Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean region, and to serve the needs for compute- and data-intensive applications for academia, government and industry. The new CYCLONE hybrid HPC machine that was fully installed in the first quarter of 2020 is a 600 TFlop/s machine equipped with Intel Cascade Lake CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs. The Center also offers an accredited one-year (90 ECTS) Master's in Simulation and Data Sciences as well as an accredited PhD in Computational Sciences.    

CaSToRC is currently involved in, amongst others, multiple EU-funded projects. The research center is the representative of Cyprus to PRACE. Since 2015, CaSToRC has coordinated two Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Joint doctoral program in computational science, first, ‘High Performance Computing in Life sciences, Engineering, And Physics (HPC-LEAP), and then ‘SimulaTIon in MULtiscaLe physicAl and biological sysTEms” (STIMULATE). CaSToRC has participated in a number of projects in different domains: BEATS, which aims to ensure efficient exploitation of the Synchrotron light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) large-scale research infrastructure by researchers across the nine SESAME Members; the ‘National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe’ (NI4OS-Europe), which aims to contribute to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) service portfolio; and an ERA Chair in ‘Modelling and SIMulation for Engineering Applications’ (SimEA), which aims to establish a team in computation-based engineering, while advancing entrepreneurship and industrial collaboration at CaSToRC.    

The involvement of CaSToRC in the RAISE project pertains to WP3 (Compute-Driven Uses-Cases towards Exascale), WP4 (Data-Driven Use-Cases towards Exascale), and WP6 (Services and Outreach). Physics-informed machine and deep learning algorithms are employed in computational fluid dynamics, in an effort to understand the behavior of liquids on surfaces, with applications in the optimization of surface features for facilitating droplet transport for water harvesting, printing technologies and oil recovery, among others (WP3). In addition, CaSToRC, through its collaboration with the Delphi consortium that is comprised of 30 international companies in the geo-energy sector, will work on the optimization of seismic imaging methodologies using AI, simulation and data assimilation approaches to enhance our ability to identify subsurface hydrocarbon reservoirs (WP4). Finally, CaSToRC will be engaged in the outreach and services activities of WP6.