Intel Corp. said on Monday it has agreed with NEC to jointly develop High Performance Computing (HPC) system technologies, which will bring Intel Xeon processor to a wider supercomputing audience.

Intel, the world's biggest maker of microprocessor, is extending the usages of Intel Xeon processors in both the volume and high-end HPC market segments, said Richard Dracott, general manager of Intel's High Performance Computing Group.

Now with NEC further innovating on Intel Xeon processor-based systems, Intel is poised to bring Intel Xeon processor performance to an even wider supercomputing audience, Dracott added.

NEC, besides selling its existing SX vector processor-based products, will bring HPC technologies to market in future supercomputers based on the Intel Xeon processor.

The initial focus of the companies' collaboration will be the development of hardware and software solutions to enhance the memory bandwidth and scalability of Intel Xeon processor-based platforms. Such enhancements are intended to benefit systems targeting not only the very high end of the scientific computing market segment, but also to benefit smaller HPC installations.

HPC or supercomputers are used by scientists, doctors and businesses. Currently, about four out of five among the top 500 supercomputers have Intel processors inside.

Intel