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Acclaimed national computing centre chooses NAG's high performance numerical libraries for its new supercomputer system

Prestigious Leibniz Rechenzentrum signs large scale licence agreement for use of NAG SMP and Parallel Libraries

September 2006. NAG, the world's leading provider of mathematical and statistical software components for academia, announces a renewed and extended partnership with the Leibniz Rechenzentrum (LRZ). This new agreement will provide researchers and postgraduate students at the centre with unlimited access to NAG's numerical libraries for high performance computing.

NAG has a long and successful track record of developing the highest quality mathematical libraries and development tools. NAG has its roots firmly placed in academia; its history and non-profit status have enabled it to build particularly strong links with research and teaching establishments, worldwide. NAG's expertise is now being brought to the new German national supercomputing system at LRZ, a 4096 CPU SGI Altix 4700, which succeeds the previously operated Hitachi SR8000 computer and offers a twenty times performance increase over its predecessor.

To ensure that researchers at the computing centre have access to numerical software that unleashes the power of the hardware, LRZ turned to NAG to provide numerical and statistical routines from the NAG SMP and Parallel Libraries. The NAG SMP Library, recently updated to Mark 21, which is used by some of the world's most prestigious supercomputing centres was produced to enable developers and programmers to make optimal use of the processing power and shared memory parallelism of Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) or cache-coherent non-uniform memory access (ccNUMA) systems.

Some of the routines within the NAG SMP Library have been specially developed and tuned to provide the utmost performance on these multi-processor platforms. These tuned routines deliver superior levels of performance and scalability compared with many other products currently available. In fact, NAG has developed and pioneered many parallelized computational algorithms, often unique to NAG.

During recent benchmark studies Mark 21 of the SMP Library outperformed many comparable products often showing vast performance improvements, crucial for programmers in today's highly competitive high performance computing environment.

Commenting on the agreement, NAG's CEO Rob Meyer, said, “The agreement with LRZ reflects a worldwide effort by NAG to equip researchers at high performance computing facilities with the tools to focus on the content of research rather than having to create and maintain the tools. We are pleased to see the latest editions of NAG HPC libraries easily accessible to researchers whose computational projects will benefit from this magnificent new centre.”

To learn more about the new supercomputing system at LRZ please visit
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/services/compute/hlrb/hardware/hardware.html

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