Intel puts $12M in new visual computing research center

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Intel announced yesterday that it will invest $12M US in a new computing research center in Europe

Intel logoIntel Corporation is investing $12 million to create a new research center that will explore advanced graphics and visual computing technologies. Opening today, the Intel Visual Computing Institute is located at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. The investment, to be made over 5 years, represents Intel’s largest European university collaboration.

Applications studied by the center will include games (I know, not very HPC), medical imaging (getting warmer) and interactive exploration of large data models for scientific visualization (bingo).

The lab will conduct both basic and applied research in realistic, interactive computer graphics and natural user interfaces. By year’s end the institute will employ about a dozen researchers from such sources as Intel, Saarland University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.

And the number of research staff is expected to grow to 60 over the next five years.

The Intel Visual Computing Institute will deliver more compelling visual computing applications through the development of new software designs and architectures, visual computing algorithms and parallel computing solutions. The institute will establish a feedback loop to Intel’s hardware design labs – including in Barcelona, Spain and Braunschweig, Germany — contributing to future visual computing hardware design. Current research contributions are expected to yield new software tools and hardware insights within just a few years.

Comments

  1. Medical Imaging processing is very much an HPC application. Registration and segmentation on a stack of MRI or CT images is quite computationally intensive. In the early days of these technologies, some of the system vendors used to embed an SGI Origin unit, then SGI Octanes into the instrument to provide the processing ‘umph’.

    These days, many are focused upon CUDA based apps to provide the processing power.

  2. Medical can be very HPC-like, especially for situations like non-uniform registration for Atlas Matching.. Typically that takes clusters of a dozen or more machines, perfectly suited for HPC work.

  3. John West says

    Joe, Randall – ok, uncle. Medical imaging is HPC.