Researchers at National College of Ireland’s Cloud Competency Centre have been awarded more than €250,000 as part of the European Commission-funded Paraphrase project, researching the most effective ways to utilise High Performance Computing (HPC) to support modern demands in business, research, entertainment and more.

ParaPhrase is a three-year research project, initially funded by the European Union to the tone of €3.5M and now extended to €4.1M. The project involves partners from 8 countries including two from Ireland: the Cloud Competency Centre at NCI and Queen's University Belfast.

Commencing in November 2013 and co-ordinated by Professor Kevin Hammond of the University of St Andrews, the new project will run for a period of 15 months and will dramatically extend the project’s original scope, benefitting from Hungarian research excellence on pattern discovery and software refactoring, and Polish expertise in artificial intelligence.

The Cloud Competency Centre at NCI was launched in September last year as part of the College’s established School of Computing, to support and strengthen the development of the cloud computing industry in Ireland and abroad. Through the centre, National College of Ireland seeks to support Ireland in taking a leadership role in this vital industry, and to fulfil the rapidly growing educational needs of the cloud computing and web technology sectors.

Thanks to this increase in funding the Centre has taken on two additional researchers: Dr Alina-Madalina Popescu and Suresh Boob, who are actively working on improvement techniques to make the elastic provision faster and efficient. Their latest findings have been accepted for publication in the renowned conference IEEE/Euromicro Parallel and Distributed Processing (PDP) to be held in Turin next February.