He is leading the Umeå University research on Grid and Cloud computing (www.cloudresearch.se), including the group's participation in large-scale national and international collaborations such as eSSENCE (a long-term Swedish strategic eScience collaboration), the three EU FP7 IP-projects RESERVOIR, OPTIMIS (as scientific coordinator), and VISION Cloud, and local industry-focused IT research within the UMIT research laboratory. The research is focused on methods, algorithms, architectures and software design principles for large scale distributed environments (Grids) and elastic federated data center infrastructures (Clouds).

The current research extends on Elmroth's broad background in scientific and high-performance computing and extensive experience from organizing supercomputing infrastructures. He received the Nordea Scientific Award 2011. Pre-historic highlights include being co-winner of the SIAM Linear Algebra Prize 2000, for the most outstanding linear algebra publication world-wide during the preceding 3-year period.

International experiences include a year at NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and one semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA.

Erik has served as member of the Council for Research Infrastructures (RFI) at the Swedish Research Council (VR) and as Chairman of VR's expert group on e-science infrastructures. He has also been appointed by the Nordic Council of Ministers for writing a Nordic eScience strategy and as a follow-up, a Nordic-Baltic eScience strategy.