EPCC in the UK is Now an Intel Parallel Computing Center

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epcc-logoThe EPCC supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh has just become the newest Intel Parallel Computing Center (IPCC). Joining the ranks of 30 IPCC centers worldwide, EPCC will receive a prestigious grant from Intel to optimize a set of HPC applications for the company’s latest parallel processor architectures.

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 utilize the latest Intel hardware effectively,” said Professor Mark Parsons, EPCC’s Executive Director for Research & Commercialisation. “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 optimized to get maximum benefit from this technology.”

EPCC’s Application Consultants, who are experts in the performance tuning of HPC modeling and simulation codes, will undertake the code porting and optimization tasks. A further aim of the IPCC is to leverage the world-leading hardware available at EPCC, and its extensive training programmes, to provide training and expertise to a wider range of academic and industrial participants in the UK and Europe on efficiently using Intel hardware for computational simulation.

In related news, Intel today announced a new RFP for institutions that wish to become an IPCC as a means to parallelize their HPC applications.