APPLICATIONS

NAG Representatives of the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) HPC team that provides Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) support for the UK’s national High End Computing Terascale Resources (HECToR) service will be meeting with Supercomputing ’08 attendees to detail the availability of NAG HPC researchers to build and lead similar HPC support teams in North America. Since October 2007, HECToR-affiliated scientific research projects have relied on NAG’s extensive expertise in HPC software engineering and performance to enable the porting optimization and parallel scaling of application code necessary to take advantage of HECToR’s computing resources. HECToR research projects have included breakthrough research throughout the science and engineering fields: drug discovery; nanoscale materials engineering; aerodynamics; medical imaging; and more. NAG is the CSE support underpinning HECToR-affiliated research projects. Andrew Jones, VP of NAG’s worldwide HPC Consulting Services comments, “NAG has assembled what is arguably one of the world’s most experienced CSE teams with the wide ranging HPC skillsets required to tackle the challenges of programming many thousands of processors in heterogeneous environments. Many of the HECToR projects would have been unable to take full advantage of the HECToR supercomputers without the CSE team’s assistance and direction on how to scale and optimize code for massively parallel systems. Now, North American supercomputing projects can enlist these same NAG experts to ensure that full HPC capabilities are realized to build and work with larger models, with better resolutions, and with data covering longer time spans. Without this kind of CSE expertise on board, it’s likely that many will find their code running slower in an environment where parallel software mastery is required.” HECToR is a public project, funded by the UK Government and is described as the UK's front-line national supercomputing service. Its objectives are:

• to provide a world-class capability-level service for UK-based academic research;
• to support the development of innovative computational technologies;
• to help industry and commerce to make effective use of high-end computing; and
• to work with colleagues in North America, Europe and the world.

NAG (www.nag.com) is dedicated to making world-class cross-platform mathematical, statistical, data mining components and tools for developers. NAG serves its customers from offices in Oxford, Chicago and Tokyo supporting over 10,000 customer sites worldwide in engineering, scientific research, finance, and government. NAG software is the choice of over 25 independent software vendors including Oracle, IBM, DemandTec and many others.