A partnership between Intel Corporation and NEC Corporation is set to push the boundaries of supercomputing with today’s announcement the two companies will jointly develop High Performance Computing (HPC) system technologies.With four out of five supercomputers listed on the TOP500 list of supercomputers being powered by Intel processors, the company is at the forefront of highly advanced systems.The partnership will see NEC bring Intel technologies to market in future supercomputers based on the Intel Xeon processor.Intel believes the partnership will help satisfy customer demand for Intel architecture based products. The initial focus of the companies’ collaboration will be the development of a vector processing system, including vector pipeline management, memory sub-systems and high-speed interconnect technology.The collaboration comes one day after Intel announced is was set to release new supercomputing technologies designed to better equip scientists, researchers and engineers with the computing power to speed up science and engineering projects, such as the development of new drugs and climate change research, in the first half of 2010.The moves come after Intel topped the TOP500 list with a record-breaking 402 of the world’s top 500 systems running Intel processors.