Intel may be barred from selling leading edge technology to China’s top supercomputer sites but it is nonetheless ramping up its high-end collaboration with China. On April 21^st, Intel launched the first Intel Parallel Computing Center in China, a joint effort with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), with widely publicized ceremonies in China.

“This is an initial 2-year collaboration around several key scientific codes, but a specific one is LAAMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator) which is used by scientists around the world,” said Charlie Wuischpard, vice president of Data Center Group and general manager of Workstations and HPC at Intel.

The event received scant coverage in U.S. media but was broadly picked up in China including national TV. Intel first posted notice of the new IPCC on April 7 (Intel Marks 30 Years in China with New Products, Investments and Collaborations) in a release highlighting the Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen, China. Without knowledge of the new IPCC, HPCwire posted a story on April 8 that several Chinese supercomputing centers had been placed on the United States “Denial List,” which prevents “high technology from the USA” from being sold to these sites (Four Chinese Supercomputing Orgs Names on US Blacklist).

Intel declined further comment on the U.S. action, but Wuischpard said, “HPC in general has a large and growing presence in China and Intel is committed to collaborating with and serving these customers. CAS is a very influential science and technology institution and home to many leading researchers across many disciplines. We chose CAS both for the quality of their proposed research as well as their connection to a large ecosystem of researchers and resources.”

Politics aside, the new IPCC is part of Intel’s steady march around the world establishing IPCCs to advance parallel computing, optimize software for its manycore architecture, and prepare for exascale computing. Intel has more than 50 IPCCs in 14 countries across a wide variety of scientific disciplines working generally on open source science codes. Intel says most of the research work is broadly useable around the world and a condition of the work is to contribute results back to the open source community.

IPCC China is the latest and part of the Computer Network Information Center of CAS. A link on the Intel Developer Zone site identifies a few of the planned IPCC China projects and associated researchers. An excerpt is below:

“[Work] will focus on two mainstream mesoscopic simulation techniques, namely the Phase Field method and the Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD), and develop efficient algorithms and codes targeting Intel Xeon Processors and Intel Xeon Phi Co-processors…We will also develop efficient DPD simulation code based on Intel Many Integrated Core Architecture…

“The focus to modernize the software codes will have a positive impact to LAMMPS, which is the most widely used applications in molecular dynamics. LAMMPS is a classical molecular dynamics code that models an ensemble of particles in a liquid, solid, or gaseous state. Providing researchers and scientist an understanding of our basic biology and DNA, cures for disease, genetics…”

The Supercomputer Center of CAS focuses on operating and maintaining supercomputers, exploiting and supporting massively parallel computing, developing visualization software and other services.

(updated, 1:37 pm ET, 4/28/15)