ACADEMIA

Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announce the signing of a multi-year agreement that will have NAG provide computational science and engineering support for users of the High End Computing Terascale Resources (HECToR) Project in the United Kingdom. With NAG's assistance in porting and tuning, a number of research consortiums with computationally-intensive projects will move their codes to the HECToR system beginning in October 2007. Preliminary work on the project will begin in April 2007. Through NAG's role in HECToR, scientific researchers will have access to NAG's extensive expertise in HPC code development, porting and optimization. A significant feature of this agreement is that NAG will provide both a centralized team of HPC experts at NAG's Oxford offices and a distributed team embedded in HECToR-affiliated research groups throughout the UK; in total around 20 full-time equivalent people per year. Where appropriate, NAG will seek to partner with other organisations to deliver specific aspects of the service such as the Oxford e-Science Research Center. EPSRC, acting as managing agent on behalf of all the UK Research Councils, has been planning the HECToR partnership since late 2003. After an extensive competitive bidding process, EPSRC selected Cray Inc to provide the hardware environment, which will be accommodated and managed by UoE HPCX Ltd at the University of Edinburgh's Advanced Computing Facility. The HECToR service is due to start in October 2007 and will have an initial theoretical peak capability of 60 Tflop/s, increasing to approximately 250 Tflop/s peak in October 2009 with a further upgrade planned for October 2011. Dr. Rob Meyer, NAG CEO explains, “NAG is delighted to be returning to its roots in UK Academia. NAG's selection to provide HECToR CSE Support reflects the decades of experience NAG has had in porting and tuning numerical codes for high performance systems. The NAG Libraries, both for serial as well as for parallel-processing architectures, have been used by scientists for research applications since we began making them commercially available more than 30 years ago. Through this partnership, NAG plans to help drive UK science forward by providing world-class support for the UK's world-class researchers.” For more information on HECToR visit its Web site.