Create an Intel Parallel Computing Center in your country

With the acquisition of interconnect assets from Cray Inc. and an aggressive development of co-processors, the giant microchip manufacturer Intel is making clear they mean business in HPC. The company is betting on the evolution of its line of co-processors, named Intel Xeon Phi, to dominate the market of accelerators for HPC and dethrone NVIDIA and its GPUs from the top. To ensure that Intel Xeon Phi enjoys a wide acceptance, Intel created an initiative called Intel Parallel Computing Centers (IPCC).

An IPCC is a unit inside an academic institution or a company that is devoted to accelerate scientific and engineering simulations with Intel Xeon Phi co-processors. To exploit all the potential of a co-processor, applications have to be analyzed to expose more parallelism and to identify regions of code that can be vectorized. This is not an easy task, and Intel acknowledges that. A particular IPCC will be focused on specific codes and will have the help of Intel experts.

The IPCC program receives applications all year round to create a new IPCC in academia, government, or industry. The award includes a renewable 2-year grant with up to $100K to $200K USD per year. The 7-10 page proposal should emphasize the impact of optimizing an application in science or engineering with Intel Xeon Phi co-processors. If you need more information on the application process, please visit the following address https://software.intel.com/en-us/ipcc.

There are currently 40 IPCCs already established in many countries. The areas of specialization of those centers include:

• Climate Modeling.
• Computational Chemistry.
• Materials Modeling.
• Data Analytics.
• Molecular Dynamics.
• Computational Fluid Dynamics.
• Linear Algebra and Multi-Physics Codes.

There is a wide distribution of IPCCs around the globe. Out of the 40 IPCCs, 50% of them are located in the United States of America, 30% in Europe, 15% in Asia, and 5% in Latin America. These 2 IPCCs in Latin America are both located in Brazil. One of them is in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and it is specialized in seismic imaging for oil and gas. The other is in the São Paulo State University and its focus is on physics simulation of particles and matter.

The Intel Parallel Computing Centers represent a good opportunity to foster collaborative research in computational science by accelerating a code on what is an architecture Intel is going to push as the flagship hardware for HPC in the future. Do you want to ride this wave?