French IT vendor Bull will give the UK’s manufacturing sector a leg up with high performance computing capacity based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge processor technology, released last year.

The manufacturing sector has been seen as critical to the UK’s economic recovery. In September last year, the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) in Coventry was opened with an investment of £40m by two UK development agencies. Its aim is to drive growth in the sector with consultancy and support for private business.

Advantage West Midlands and the East Midlands Development Agency funded the center which bridges the gap between academic research and commercial production in response to the UK Government’s manufacturing strategy, which aims to find new opportunities for the industry.

It is part of the government’s Technology Innovation Center (TIC), a consortium of seven research centers being set up to focus on manufacturing for predicted growth areas, including the production of offshore wind turbines, nuclear power plants, batteries for electrical vehicles and new fuel-efficient passenger aircraft.

The MTC, working with research partners including the universities of Birmingham, Nottingham, Loughborough and engineering consultancy TWI, is employing HPC equipment and skills from Bull to help companies focus on the supply chain through simulation, to make the industry more competitive.

Bull sales and marketing director Andrew Carr said Bull has already started work on the HPC solution, based on a Linux 64-bit operating system and consisting of more than 30 compute nodes, each with two Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors of eight cores, 2.60GHz, 8.00GT/s and 20MB.

It will have 4GB 1600MHz memory per core and two nodes with 8GB per fore and a ‘fat’ (high memory) node for pre- and post-processing work as well as 100TB of RAID6 storage.

“MTC was working to very tight timescales for this project and needed to demonstrate value-for-money from its investments,” Carr said.

MTC CEO Dr Clive Hickman hinted that the contract with Bull would be on going. “We look forward to working with Bull and to them delivering a solution that not only meets our needs today but also for the future,” Hickman said.

TIC funding ensures that the MTC will have on going funding of £30m per annum for the development of skills and equipment for consortium partners and collaboration projects.