CSC in Finland Becomes Latest Intel Parallel Computing Center

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CSCToday CSC in Finland announced that the institution has become one of the newest Intel Parallel Computing Centers. CSC will collaborate with Intel to develop parallel algorithms and optimize several open source HPC applications for Intel’s latest parallel processor architectures. The work will be conducted by CSC in collaboration with Finnish Centre of Excellence in Atmospheric Science research unit and Bull’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming (IPCC).

The grant from Intel opens a fantastic opportunity for us to focus effort on optimization and parallelization of codes that are key to the users of CSC’s present and future supercomputer systems”, says Per Öster, Director of Research Infrastructures and leader of the project, as he also stresses the importance to prepare for the shift in processor architectures that will take place in the next few years.

Parallelization and optimization of the codes will be carried out by the CSC HPC team using an extremely energy-efficient liquid-cooled Bull B715 supercomputer prototype and CSC’s other supercomputer resources. Targeting the latest generations of Intel Xeon processors as well as Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, this modernizing of key applications is expected to enable large performance increases.

Validating current approximations and obtaining new and more detailed insight into the mechanisms of atmospheric new-particle formation is computationally very demanding – this can be only achieved by very efficient parallelization”, says researcher Ville Loukonen from Professor Hanna Vehkamäki’s Computational aerosol physics group from the University of Helsinki.