SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 14 – The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) today revealed that the benefits of NAG High Performance Computing (HPC) expertise are now enjoyed by customers across 5 of the 6 inhabited continents – North America, Europe, South Africa, Australia, and Asia.

With its headquarters in Oxford, NAG has additional offices in Manchester, Chicago, Tokyo and Taipei, serving HPC Services and Consulting customers around the world – including multinational companies, academic supercomputing users, and national funding agencies.

With a team of HPC experts comparable in size to major supercomputing centres, NAG's HPC Services and Consulting helps customers to secure the performance benefits of HPC through software engineering services to deliver performance, scalability and algorithmic innovation to customer application software; together with impartial advice on strategy, technology and procurement; and training programs for users and developers.

NAG's highest profile HPC Services customer is the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), who procure and manage the UK's national academic supercomputing services on behalf of Research Councils UK. The current national supercomputing service, HECToR (www.hector.ac.uk) includes a comprehensive Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Support Service, operated by NAG.

Under the HECToR CSE Service, NAG has overseen in excess of 50 projects delivering performance, scalability and feature enhancements to a wide range of scientific codes – including materials science, oceanography, atmospheric science, fluid turbulence, and molecular dynamics amongst others. The performance and scalability of these codes have been improved by factors of between 4x and 40x.

The impact on the science has been dramatic, as highlighted by these extracts from quotes given by researchers in the case study reports. (The full quotes, together with descriptions of the enabling HPC software development can be found at in the reports at: www.hector.ac.uk/cse/reports.)

"We now have the ability to integrate the helium-laser Schrödinger Equation in its full generality (essentially 6-spatial dimensions plus time integration). This ability is unique," said Professor Kenneth Taylor, Queen's University Belfast.

"Users of both CASTEP and ONETEP will now be able to tackle significantly larger systems: with the old code, there was an effective maximum size of around 3,000 atoms on HECToR Phase 3 which has now grown to 100,000 atoms. This will enable users of CASTEP to study larger structures, such as grain boundaries, and for ONETEP to tackle larger molecules, such as proteins and DNA segments," said Matt Probert, University of York.

"Because of the complexity of the flow configuration, these simulations require hundreds of millions of mesh points and thus it was almost impossible two years ago to perform the numerical modelling. The new version of the code is a blessing as it will speed up our research and will allow us to compare simulations with experimental results," said Christos Vassilicos, Imperial College London.

These examples show the real and substantial increases in science that can be secured by investing in software innovation in addition to the supercomputing hardware. This also translates to a cost saving for the funding body – as a given amount of science can be achieved with less computing resource and time.

Industrial users of HPC benefit in the same manner – by exploiting NAG expertise to realize the performance potential and cost effectiveness of their existing and planned hardware investments.

For further information on NAG HPC Services and Consulting, visit NAG at booth 2431 at SC12, or visit the website at www.nag.com/hpc.

About NAG

The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) is dedicated to applying its unique expertise in numerical engineering to delivering high-quality computational software and high performance computing services. For over 40 years NAG experts have worked closely with world-leading researchers in academia and industry to create powerful, reliable and flexible software which today is relied on by tens of thousands of individual users, as well as numerous independent software vendors. NAG serves its customers from offices in Oxford, Manchester, Chicago, Tokyo and Taipei, through staff in France and Germany, as well as via a global network of distributors.

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Source: The Numerical Algorithms Group