Intel and Dell will be setting up a hybrid supercomputer dubbed “Stampede” for the University of Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).  Stampede is a 10-petaflop powerhouse that will be deployed in January 2013 and comes with Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) x86 coprocessor.  MIC is the successor of “Larrabee,” a failed attempt by the chipmaker to manufacture GPUs and get into Nvidia’s territory.  The chip, over 50 Pentium cores linked together, is set to launch in the second half of 2012.

Dell’s offices, located in the same street as the university where its founder Michael Dell conceived the company, is the same company hired to build Stampede. It will join two other existing systems.

“Stampede follows TACC’s Opteron-based “Ranger” system built by Sun Microsystems, which has 62,976 cores and weighs in at 579.4 teraflops. A third machine, built by Dell and called “Lonestar”, has 22,656 Xeon cores delivering 302 teraflops.”

Intel has been busy in the academic space, and not just with building supercomputers. The company is looking to expand its open-source portfolio. It has doing that by paying attention to OpenStack and other initiatives, and also be signing up universities to host its Intel Science and Technology Centers. We covered how less than two weeks ago four universities reached an agreement with the company to host the centers that come with a budget of $2.5/yr throughout a period 5 years.

The ISTC project has a total budget of $100 million, and two earlier centers at Carnegie Mellon University took up about a third of that according to the chipmaker.

Dell, the second provider responsible for the University of Texas TAAC supercomputers, doing some good as it works on expanding its services business.  ProSupport is now available to European customers and it also signed an OEM agreement with Dataram.