The Cyprus Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, have signed a research and educational collaboration agreement for the development of the Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) of the Cyprus Institute.
The agreement formalises a collaborative engagement which started two years ago and already covers numerous research programs in visualisation, climate modeling and scientific simulations.
The CaSToRC is developing into a regional leader in computational science, engineering, and technology research. The center will provide high-performance computing resources to researchers in Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean region, as well as offering research and educational programs.
CaSToRC is leveraging the University of Illinois world renowned NCSA's (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) expertise in designing and operating supercomputing centers and installing, operating, and delivering groundbreaking science using high performance computing.
The agreement formalises the establishment of joint research and educational programs, the sharing of faculty and students, beginning with doctoral students conducting research at the University of Illinois and the Cyprus Institute.
“The Cyprus Institute is an important cornerstone of Illinois’ global foot print, addressing the issue of high performance computing, visualisation and societal impact, we value greatly the strengths that the Cyprus Institute offers,” said Professor Ravi K. Iyer, Vice-Chancellor of Research at the University of Illinois.
It is anticipated that by next year CaSToRC will be home to tens of teraflops of computing power (each ''teraflop'' is one thousand billion calculations every second) and by 2013, it will be home to hundreds of teraflops of computing power. These resources will be used to tackle critical research questions in environmental science and engineering, digital cultural heritage, bioinformatics, scientific computing, and other basic sciences.
“CaSToRC is the first center of its kind in the Eastern Mediterranean—providing the indispensable computing resources researchers need to be at the forefront of science and engineering today. Collaboration with Illinois, a renowned leader in high performance computing, will be a catalyst in enabling Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean research community to pursue cutting edge computing related research,” said Professor Costas Papanicolas, the President of the Cyprus Institute.
