The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin says it will collaborate with Intel (News - Alert) to “help prepare the national open science research community to take full advantage of the new capabilities” of Intel's forthcoming many integrated core (MIC) network processor line.

"TACC is constantly evaluating new technologies to accelerate computation," said Dan Stanzione, TACC's deputy director, adding that they see the Intel MIC processor line as “an exciting leap forward." TACC is one of over 100 Intel partners working to optimize software for MIC processors.

About a year ago, TMCnet reported that the National Science Foundation, The University of Texas and multiple partners committed $9 million to TACC to acquire a new Lonestar system that is expected to support more than 1,000 research projects in science and engineering over three years.

Intel has given TACC a software development platform for MIC processors for porting software, Intel officials say, explaining that later in 2011, TACC and Intel will deploy a cluster using the Intel MIC architecture-based platform to “explore scalability across nodes.”

Intel will also give TACC early access to its first commercial MIC processors, enabling TACC to ensure that applications achieve maximum performance on the first MIC production processors.

Future MIC processors from Intel are being designed to achieve tremendous performance for applications that possess a high degree of data parallelism, TACC officials say, adding that “typical applications expected to see benefit from the Intel MIC processors include molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry, as well as emerging data-intensive applications such as seismic imaging, sensor network analysis, and real-time analytics.”

Last year, Intel said it will build its MIC processors using the company's forthcoming 22-nanometer manufacturing process, and said that the chips will scale to more than 50 Intel processing cores on a single chip.