In this introductory talk we will overview the main activities of the High Performance Computing Competence Centre of Cyprus being developed by the Computation-based Science and Technology Research Centre (CaSToRC) of The Cyprus Institute, within the European network EuroCC. The EuroCC project comprises of 33 National Competence Centres (NCCs) in an equivalent number of countries and is part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking of the European Union.

 

The National Competence Centre (NCC) is envisioned to provide High Performance Computing (HPC) services to academia, industry (including SMEs) and the public sector and facilitate the uptake of HPC in Cyprus. The NCC will act as the focal point, providing access of national stakeholders to HPC infrastructure, training and skills development. In close collaboration with the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation & Digital Policy and the Research and Innovation Foundation, it will promote the digital transformation of Cyprus across academia, industry and the public sector. The establishment of a well-functioning NCC is envisioned to act as a catalyst towards a wider adoption of advanced computing and data science technologies, elevating the national productivity and competitiveness of academia, research and government to European standards of excellence.

 

The Cyprus NCC is co-funded by Horizon 2020 and the Cyprus Government (Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation & Digital Policy).

 

Constantia Alexandrou received a BA degree in Physics from the University of Oxford in 1980 and a PhD in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA in 1985. She held research positions at the Paul Scherer Institute, Switzerland and at Erlangen University, Germany. She is Professor at the Physics Department of the University of Cyprus, where she leads the Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) Computational Lab.

She is coordinator of several research programs, has over 250 scientific publications and numerous invited talks at international meetings, and has organized several workshops in Cyprus and abroad. She is the representative of Cyprus at IUPAP (International Union of Pure and Applied Physics) and PRACE (Partnership of Advanced Computing in Europe).

She served as Vice-Chair of the Interim Governing Board (IGB) of the Cyprus Institute and as Chair of the IGB of the Computational-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC). She is an Institute Professor at The Cyprus Institute and the Acting Director of CaSToRC since 2010.

 

In his talk, Simone will present a worldwide overview of High-Performance Computing systems, in particular, supercomputers. He will review the latest release of the top500 list and outline the future plans in Europe and USA.

Simone Bacchio is a Computational Scientist at CaSToRC of the Cyprus Institute and a key staff of NCC. He has received a joint doctorate in Physics and Applied Mathematics awarded by the University of Cyprus and University of Wuppertal (Germany).