SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 3 — An Intel piece reveals the details about recently established Intel Parallel Computing Centers at prestigious universities through the Intel Software Academic Program. University of Oregon, Pennsylvania State University and Georgia Institute of Technology all received cutting edge instruments and guidance to further parallel processing knowledge and innovation.
The document describes how Intel provided Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors to Penn State’s Computer Sciences department so that researchers could analyze power and performance impact on hardware data prefetching. The tools enable comparison with different prefetching methods against different types of operations. This study feeds directly into the larger context of parallel processing.
The publication highlights the University of Oregon computer scientists that have constructed an undergraduate course entitled Structured Parallel Computing. Successfully launched in the spring of 2014, the class addresses parallelization as it relates to High Performance Computing (HPC), scientific visualization, performance modeling, and adaptive algorithms. Students now have access to Intel Cilk Plus, Intel Thread Building Blocks (TBB), OpenMP, and the Intel MPI Library, giving them hands-on experience earlier in their education.
Georgia Tech is conducting research that seeks to modernize quantum chemistry codes used in materials science. By designing a parallel code called GTFock, scientists can closely predict properties of materials using fundamental physical principles. This allows scalability to previously unattainable numbers of computing nodes. The team at Georgia Tech ran large batches of code on the Tianhe-2, one of the world’s most powerful computers, along with two Xeon Phi coprocessors. The experiment produced computations using more than 1.6 million cores, all working in parallel.
The success story emphasizes the Intel Software Academic Program commitment to higher education as a way of facilitating the next wave of technological discovery. By offering the latest tools and resources to these forward-thinking universities, Intel is doing its part to energize and inspire future engineers, programmers and designers.
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Source: Intel Software Academic Program