He has established the Umeå University research on distributed systems, focusing on theory, algorithms, and systems for the autonomous management of ICT resources, spanning from individual servers to large scale cloud datacenters, federated clouds, highly distributed edge clouds, and software-defined infrastructures. The team has been grown to six faculty members and a total of nearly 30 people. The current research extends on Elmroth's broad background in scientific and high-performance computing and extensive experience from organizing supercomputing infrastructures. As part of his research, he as supervised over 30 completed and ongoing PhD students, including over 20 as the main advisor.

Elmroth is member of the Executive Committee and four other management groups of the 6.2 billion SEK Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) and coordinates Umeå University's activities in the program. He is also member of the program management group and one of the original principal investigator for the eSSENCE Strategic Research Program, up to now being funded by 370 million SEK. Other recent research leadership highlights include being the principal investigator for three projects funded by the Kempe foundations, in total funding 25 postdoc researchers in AI, aunonomous systems, and software. Elmroth's team frequently participates in large-scale national and international EU FP7, H2020, and Horizon Europe projects such as RESERVOIR, OPTIMIS, VISION Cloud, CACTOS, ORBIT, RECAP, ACTiCLOUD, FogGuru, and COGNIT, as well as the EU networks ACROSS and AAPELE. A particular past highlight was being the principal investigator for Cloud Control, which was the second largest project ever funded by the Swedish Research Council, taking a control theoretic approach to fundamental problems for autonomous cloud datacenter management systems.

Elmroth is life-time member of the Swedish Royal Academy for Engineering Sciences and has been Vice Chair for its Division on Information Technology. Previously, he was the Chair of the Board of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC). He has also served as Chair of the Swedish Research Council's (VR's) expert group on e-science infrastructures and as member of VR's Council for Research Infrastructures (RFI). He has been appointed by the Nordic Council of Ministers for developing a Nordic eScience strategy and as a follow-up, a Nordic-Baltic eScience strategy as well as by SNIC for producing a national HPC strategy. He has held a three-year position as national HPC lecturer appointed by the Swedish Council for High Performance Computers (HPDR).

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 (in any journal) 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.

He is founder and chair of the Control Workshops series (www.cloudresearch.org/workshops).

As part of exploiting his research, Elmroth has co-founded Elastisys AB, an expert on security and regulatory compliance in the cloud-native ecosystem. Elastisys has over 40 employees and has received recognition such as being the Umeå University Spinn-off company of the Year and has been included on the "33-list" by the magazines Ny Teknik and Affärsvärlden, for Sweden's 33 hottest young companies.