Kitware and TACC Collaborate to Become an Intel® Parallel Computing Center

Kitware has recently become an Intel® Parallel Computing Center in collaboration with Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). This team will focus its efforts on supporting Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor in the ParaView application for data analysis and visualization, as well as in the underlying Visualization Toolkit (VTK).

Today, HPC is widely recognized as a strategic capability of fundamental importance to the economic strength and national security of the United States and other developed countries, applicable to areas ranging from engineering simulation to medical computing to climate modeling. However, it can be difficult to deploy HPC at scale due to the complexity of the programming model and the lack of reference implementations with which to educate and accelerate the creation of new software solutions.

To address these challenges, the team of collaborators will work to add support for Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor in VTK/ParaView. Adding this capability to these well-established and widely adopted open-source projects will not only provide easily deployable scalable solutions, but will also serve as a working example for software developers to study and extend.

“The opportunity to become an Intel® Parallel Computing Center will foster a collaboration between Kitware, TACC, and Intel that will enhance ParaView to run more efficiently on the Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor platform,” Dr. Berk Geveci, Kitware’s Principal Investigator for the project and Senior Director of Scientific Computing, said. “We are honored to be part of such a critical effort in HPC.”

For the project, Kitware and TACC will optimize VTK/ParaView to support Phi’s wide vector processing capability and to take advantage of the large number of computing cores. The team will develop support for both coarse and fine-grained parallelism, and will release open-source software to demonstrate the use of these capabilities in a variety of scientific computing applications. By leveraging the multi-core and vector capabilities of the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors, the team will demonstrate a significant increase in the performance of VTK/ParaView.

Kitware’s scientific computing team will collaborate with TACC under the leadership of its principal investigator, Dr. Paul A. Navrátil. Dr. Navrátil is a Research Associate and the Manager of TACC’s Scalable Visualization Technologies group. He is an expert in high-performance visualization technologies and advanced rendering techniques, including algorithms for large-scale distributed-memory ray tracing.

To learn more about Kitware’s HPC and visualization expertise and how it can be used to your organization’s advantage, please contact kitware(at)kitware(dot)com.