ACADEMIA

Xcelerit has announced the release of the latest version of its award-winning Software Development Kit (SDK). Extending its range of supported hardware, the Xcelerit SDK 2.0 also ships with dozens of improvements introduced to increase both software performance and users productivity.

The Xcelerit SDK is designed to make light work of exploiting the parallelism existing in today’s High Performance SuperComputing hardware. As Hicham Lahlou, CEO of Xcelerit explains. “Using the Xcelerit SDK, companies only need to make quite minor changes to their existing code and they can then run it on multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and grids of such platforms achieving maximum performance with very little programmer effort”, he said.

The Xcelerit toolkit has already been extensively deployed in the computational finance domain to speed-up computations in pricing and risk management. Earlier this year, Xcelerit scooped the award for most innovative HPC application from PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe).

“Our SDK makes life easy for developers who are domain focussed and don’t want to become expert in different parallel programming techniques”, commented Lahlou. “They can concentrate on their problems in finance, engineering, and research and our tool takes care of the software performance”, he said.

With the new version “Xcelerit continues to push the limits, improving performance, and making sure that we are meeting our customers’ expectations in terms of ease-of-use”, said Lahlou.

The latest version provides support for the new Kepler GPU architecture from Nvidia. The Tesla K10 GPU delivers the industry’s highest single precision performance (4.58 Teraflops) and highest memory bandwidth (320 GB/sec) in a single accelerator.
Xcelerit is committed to ensuring support for the latest advances in supercomputing hardware. “The beauty of our SDK is that users need only one codebase and Xcelerit will make sure that it runs on all supported HPC platforms today and tomorrow”, comments Xcelerit’s Lahlou. “This is a completely future-proof solution”

The SDK 2.0 extends support for the Xcelerit ‘Quant’ add-on announced earlier this year. It brings a tailored acceleration solution for computational finance combining performance, flexibility, and ease-of-use. ‘Quant’ comes equipped with mathematical routines that are highly optimised for each supported hardware platform. ‘Quant’ is also designed to talk to popular software packages such as MATLAB or Excel.

“In building the latest version of the Xcelerit SDK, we listened closely to what our customers needed”, said Lahlou. “They wanted to squeeze the maximum performance out of HPC hardware and benefit from a set of tools and libraries to make that task easier. With this release, I believe we have delivered.”

The Xcelerit SDK is available for licensing to customers to run on supported Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. Plugins for commonly used IDEs are also available. For a full list of supported systems, please visit the product website at http://www.xcelerit.com/xcelerit-sdk.