Today the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) has announced the NAG Software Modernization Service. The new service solves the porting and performance challenges faced by customers wishing to use the capabilities of modern computing systems, such as multi-core CPUs, GPUs and Xeon Phi. NAG HPC software engineering experts modernize the code to enable portability to appropriate architectures, optimize for performance and assure robustness.
This is an exciting time for technical computing, whether desktop scale or High Performance Computing (HPC) – there are so many technology options to deliver performance to users and value to business – yet the difficulty of modernizing software to achieve the promised performance limits users. This new service solves that problem for customers with software modernization by experienced numerical software professionals” said Andrew Jones, Vice-President of Strategic HPC Consulting at NAG.
All mainstream current and future computing technology uses parallel processing to promise performance improvements. System architectures have increasingly complex memory hierarchies and performance characteristics. Software must be modified, ‘modernized’, in order to exploit this hardware complexity to access the potential performance. Un-modernized software risks operating at a severely restricted level of capability.
NAG has been working with numerical software for nearly 50 years to improve portability, implement parallelism, better scalability, and optimize performance whilst ensuring application robustness. NAG’s unique combination of expertise in HPC technology and numerical software engineering (e.g., over 80 HPC software innovation projects) enables NAG to deliver assured Software Modernization Services to customers.
The service will help customers with the following:
- Get the best performance out of current systems to improve cost-effectiveness and business capability
- Enable the use of new technologies such as GPUs, Xeon Phi, ARM processors and more
- Protect the application software’s ability to exploit future architectures
- Achieve software modernization needs with the right balance of cost, quality and time
- Rely on proven expertise, experience and technology impartiality
NAG has delivered, and continues to deliver, successful HPC and software engineering projects throughout academia, government and industry, including sectors such as Oil & Gas, Manufacturing, Aerospace, Financial Services, and Data Analytics.
In one sense this is business as usual for us, as we’ve been porting versions of our software to new architectures since NAG started in 1970” said Mike Dewar, Chief Technical Officer at NAG. “However what’s different about the current landscape is the explosion in the amount of parallelism in modern CPUs and the complex new memory technologies which are beginning to emerge. To take advantage of these developments requires specialist expertise to ensure that software changes aren’t just applicable to today’s architectures but will deliver value on the machines people will be buying five or ten years from now. Luckily NAG has that expertise and is able to apply it to benefit a wide variety of our customers.”
For more information, visit the NAG team at booth #518 at ISC 2016.
