"We're entering a phase where exploiting the power of multi-core processors is critical for customers to accelerate the innovation and discovery that is directly tied to their business outcomes", stated Winston Prather, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing, HP. "HP, a leader in the HPC market, is working with its partners to help customers capitalize on a new era of high-productivity computing."

The Multi-Core Optimization Programme brings together developments from HP and its partners that enhance multi-core performance across a variety of industry-standard HPC architectures, platforms and operating environments. Initial partners include Accelrys Inc., Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and TotalView Technology.

"The emergence of multi-core technology allows for HPC technology to better help solve grand challenges; we’ve already seen an impact on large-scale numerical simulation in many fields of applications", stated Prof. Dr. V. Heuveline, board member, Steinbuch Centre for Computing, KIT. "The collaborative work with HP is highly innovative and will allow us to enhance knowledge and capabilities by coupling fundamental science to applied technology."

HP has been investing in multi-core optimization since the first dual-core processors became available and is delivering many capabilities today within its Unified Cluster Portfolio, including:

• The HP ProLiant DL140 and DL145 servers are specifically designed to balance multi-core processor performance with memory and I/O performance in HP Cluster Platform 3000 and 4000 solutions;
• The widely-used HP Message Passing Interface library has been optimized for both shared memory and cluster systems on HP ProLiant and Integrity servers, supporting CPU binding strategies for both processes and threads, making it ideal for multi-core environments;
• Multi-core application scheduling within HP's XC Linux cluster software is provided with HP's recent enhancement to the Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management, an open source tool. HP's enhancements have been added to the open source.

HP also has expanded its extensive development tools portfolio, including compilers, debuggers and math libraries that are now available for a variety of processor and system architectures, operating systems and interconnects. The expanded portfolio, packaged as a multi-core application development tool suite, is expected to be available by year end and will include products from HP and leaders in HPC software development such as TotalView Technologies.

HP is also adding technical support to help optimize independent software vendors' (ISVs) applications for multi-core performance. Through its expertise and support, HP will help ISVs address the challenge of capitalizing on multi-core technology to meet customer demand for scalable application performance growth.

"Our customers are demanding performance beyond what current processor technology alone can deliver", stated Keith Glassford, vice president, Materials Science Marketing, Accelrys Inc. "Given the rapid uptake in multi-core technology, Accelrys is increasing its efforts to optimize our high-performance computing applications for these systems. Working with HP’s Multi-Core Optimization Programme dovetails nicely into our existing HPC strategy to provide accelerated solutions for our customers."

The HP Multi-Core Optimization Programme was announced at the International Supercomputing Conference 2007, where HP is exhibiting at booth B32.