ICT services

The ICT Services provided by the facility include access to HPC resources with multi-level user support, Cloud and Data Storage. The Facility also provides services related to software and systems integration. The HPCF works closely, under formal agreements, with world-class supercomputing facilities, such as the NCSA (U. of Illinois, USA) and the Juelich Supercomputing Centre (Germany) for knowledge exchange and joint research. Over the last few years, having served hundreds of projects from several neighboring countries (Israel, Egypt, Greece, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey), the Facility has had a major impact, being the first open-access supercomputing facility in the region. The Facility also serves the Cyprus Ministry of Agriculture Meteorology Service by providing the compute and storage capacity for the daily weather forecast. In addition to user support, the Facility offers deployment, integration and optimization services, such as aiding in the optimization of processing pipelines for efficient use of compute and storage resources (e.g. in Next Generation Sequencing, climate modeling, and bioinformatics).

This has come about through the deployment of a series of supercomputers since 2011. Recently, it has also become the "de jure" focal-point thought the recognition of the CyI as the National HPC Competence center. Recent additions to the capabilities of the CyI infrastructure that will be made available to this project is "Cyclone" a 600Tflop supercomputer with extensive AI computation capacity (including 64 V100 40GB GPU's and 1400 cores), a 20-node private cloud system, and an upgrade of the total storage capacity to over 5PB (raw). On the software side, IT engineers from our HPC facility have worked closely with researches from several life-sciences research groups to optimize and deploy hundreds of bioinformatics and related software. Through this project we will continue the implementation of modern (containerized) deployment methods with automated and easily-reproducible workflows and processing pipelines.