For many years the department has had a licence for Intel’s optimizing compilers and maths libraries which is paid for by several research groups.
Updated versions of the Intel compilers and libraries are now going to be released as part of a new product called OneAPI, which is entirely free to download and use, so no one will need to pay for annual renewals to get access to new releases any more. There’s also no longer a limit on how many people can use the software at once.
The latest release of the Intel compilers from OneAPI has been installed on managed Linux workstations and compute clusters with sufficiently new operating systems (Ubuntu 18.04 workstations, rogue and nest clusters). OneAPI also comes with Intel MPI which we used to have to buy separately so we now have access to that on all those machines.
The older compilers will carry on working indefinitely, using the licence that was renewed in January.