In this special guest feature, Linda Barney writes that researchers at the University of Cambridge are using an Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor-based supercomputer from SGI to accelerate discovery efforts. “We have managed to modernize and optimize the main workhorse code used in the research so it now runs at 1/100-1/1000 of the original runtime. This allows us to tackle problems which would have taken unfeasibly long to solve. Secondly, it has opened windows for previously unthinkable research, namely using the MODAL code in cosmological parameter search: this is a problem which is constantly being solved in an iterative process, but adding the MODAL results to the process has only become possible with the improved performance.”