Edinburgh joins ranks of Intel Parallel Computing Centres

We wrote back in January that Bristol University had been selected by Intel to become an Intel Parallel Computing Centre (IPCC). Now, the University of Edinburgh joins the ranks.

Intel Xeon Phi PCIe Card

EPCC is the supercomputing centre at Edinburgh and it will be working with Intel. The university has announced:

EPCC … has been designated an Intel Parallel Computing Centre (IPCC), through a prestigious grant from Intel – a distinction currently held by only a handful of parallel computing centres worldwide. Through this new partnership, EPCC will collaborate with Intel to optimise several open source high performance computing (HPC) applications for Intel’s latest parallel processor architectures.

Professor Mark Parsons, EPCC’s Executive Director (Research & Commercialisation), said:

“Designation as an IPCC gives us an incredible opportunity to work on a range of important, and widely used, simulation codes to ensure that they can utilise the latest Intel hardware effectively. ARCHER, the UK’s national HPC service hosted and supported by EPCC is a Cray XC30 system with Intel Xeon Processor E5-2697 v2. It is therefore essential that mainstream simulation packages, which account for more than half the usage of ARCHER, are properly optimised to get maximum benefit from this technology.”

Parallel computing is used, says Edinburgh, by a “wide community of simulation scientists for world leading science on global challenges such as energy security, climate change, and future manufacturing technologies”.