Within the first 12 month of operation, the Cy-Tera supercomputer at The Cyprus Institute consumed computational time that could be achieved by a standard double core laptop over the period of 456 years of continuous operation.
According to an announcement issued by the Cyprus Institute, the Cy-Tera is the first national supercomputer facility open to all scientists in Cyprus, being in operation since May 2012.
It operates following the model of other established European supercomputing centres and was funded through the infrastructure call of the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation and its operations are supported through the EU project LinkSCEEM-2 coordinated by The Cyprus Institute.
The facility, the announcement points out, is of regional relevance being currently the largest available computational resource for academic research in the Eastern Mediterranean. It demonstrates the leadership role that Cyprus can play in the region and its potential of becoming an educational and research bridge between Eastern Mediterranean and the EU.
The announcement notes that the successful operation of the machine is being carried out by an operational team which not only takes care of the day-to-day operation of Cy-Tera but also provides user support and training to help scientists to fully utilise the system. The up time of the machine is comparable to that of established supercomputing centers showing the successful management of the facility.
In addition, it is pointed out in the announcement that within the first 12 month of operation some 80 research projects were started on Cy-Tera. This gave 117 scientists access to this large scale computational facility. So far, the projects consumed 8 million core hours (7 million CPU and 1 million GPU hours) of computational time. A similar amount of computation could be achieved by a standard double core laptop over the period of 456 years of continuous operation.
The scientific simulations that were performed on Cy-Tera produced in the order of 70TB (terra bytes) of data. For comparison, the same amount of storage could hold the entire human genome 100,000 times or the content of the bible 17 million times (size of human genome is approx. 700 MB, the bible contains 4,349,617 characters including whitespace).
Scientists from the first access period are now analysing the valuable data produced on Cy-Tera to further advance science and help to give Cyprus the competitive edge it needs to secure a prosperous future.
