Since 2012, CISTER is housed in a 3-storey autonomous building, entirely used by CISTER members and CISTER-related activities. The CISTER building is situated across the street from the ISEP campus and is also at a walking distance from the FEUP campus.

The building has over 1500 square-meters of area, out of which over 950 square-meters for offices, open-spaces, meeting rooms, hands-on labs and auditorium. In 2016 and 2017 CISTER accommodated around 70 people simultaneously on average. From 2012 until 2016, the use of the CISTER building required a significant financial effort from CISTER and ISEP, as the building was rented and a number of adaptations to enable its proper usage by CISTER were required. In 2016, the building was acquired by the Polytechnic of Porto and therefore that financial overhead (roughly 800 K Euros for the 5 years) was almost eliminated. Consequently, with the end of this financial constraint, in 2016, CISTER established a strategy of gradually growing its pool of researcher members to a target number of around 100. This strategy is currently being implemented with a special focus on targeting 30-35 active PhD students as well as around 10 research engineers (in support of the implementation and validation tasks related to R&D projects).

The CISTER building is organised into three main areas. The third floor is dedicated to housing management activities, including the offices for the research leaders, management, administrative personnel and senior faculty as well as two meeting rooms for support. The second floor is essentially used to host fundamental research activities (full-time research PhD members and PhD-students). Besides a number of offices and open-spaces to accommodate these full-time researchers, this floor has a kitchen, the main cafeteria and the general secretariat services. Additionally, it has two meeting rooms (with telco facilities) and a prayer room. Finally, the first floor is essentially used to accommodate industry-related research projects development, undergrad projects and outreach. In addition to the offices and open-spaces, in that floor, there is an auditorium and large hands-on labs which in conjunction are successfully used to host workshops, seminars and relatively large project events.

Taking advantages of the conditions offered by the new facilities, CISTER organized a number of industry-oriented workshops (the CiWork series), housed the CiTech initiative (a CISTER-driven Portuguese ecosystem for critical computing systems), has already been responsible for more than 20 collaborations with more than 30 Portuguese companies, and hosted over 20 large meetings related to international projects.

Remember to check out our Instagram for the latest pictures from CISTER.

Outside

Auditorium

Meeting Spaces

Offices

The Lab

Technology

Public Areas

The Deck

Kitchen and Cafeteria