The Technology Strategy Board is investing up to £1m to establish new knowledge transfer partnerships (KTPs) in the field of parallel computing and multi-core programming. 

The competitiveness and growth of many industrial sectors in the UK, including the creative industries, financial services and security, depends on the use of high-performance computing. The effective exploitation of parallel computing (of which multi-core is an example) could have, substantial economic impact. Companies  that can take advantage of the trend towards multi-core processor chips are likely to have a competitive advantage. 

This competition aims to increase awareness of this technology and to ensure that UK industry maintains world-class innovation capability. 

Through this investment we aim to:

·         stimulate, improve and promote the adoption of parallel computing in businesses across a range of sectors

·         raise the profile of key UK capability in the parallel processing area

·         encourage greater and more sustainable knowledge exchange between end users, innovators, researchers and practitioners through a partnership approach. 

We aim to establish 15 KTPs through this pilot thematic competition that will run together as a cohort supported by a programme of networking between the partners. The cohort approach will encourage knowledge sharing across projects and associates, potentially giving the businesses involved access to knowledge and expertise held by a range of academic groups with different perspectives on the challenges. 

We will highlight the development and achievements of the cohort to increase awareness of the potential impact of parallel computing for UK organisations outside the cohort and to signpost the cohort as a source of expert advice and information to enable those organisations to begin exploiting it fully. We expect the initial benefit to industry to be easier access to UK experts who can help them to increase the efficiency and speed of the software they depend upon. This is expected to lead to increased competitiveness and sales.