HPCwire: Expanding the HPC Ecosystem

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July 28, 2006

Expanding the HPC Ecosystem

by Steve Conway, Conway Communications

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Over the past three years, the Council on Competitiveness has sponsored pioneering studies and conferences on the relationship between HPC and business competitiveness, under the direction of Council Vice President Suzy Tichenor. In January 2006, Bob Graybill, former DARPA HPCS program manager and current division director of USC's Information Sciences Institute, became a senior advisor to the Council. He is helping to guide the Council's HPC Initiative as it works to link together government, academic and business organizations in a "national ecosystem" aimed at advancing innovation and competitiveness through greater use of HPC.

In this exclusive HPCwire interview, Tichenor and Graybill discuss the importance of HPC for businesses and preview information that will be disclosed in more detail at the Council's annual HPC Users Conference on September 7.

HPCwire: When and why did the Council begin looking at the importance of HPC in the private sector?

Tichenor: We've been looking at this for several years, as an outgrowth of our work in innovation. The Council believes that for the U.S. to remain preeminent in global markets, to increase productivity and raise our standard-of-living, we as a nation must become more innovation-based. If work is routine, rule-based, if it can be digitized and reliably codified, there's going to be a low-cost source of labor somewhere in the world to compete for that work and for those jobs.

Our competitive strength is in our ability to be more innovative. So the questions becomes, how do you promote, finance and educate for innovation, and what kind of infrastructure is needed to support this? That's where HPC comes in. We believe there's a need for pervasive access to and use of supercomputing. Three years ago, we launched an initiative to identify how HPC is really being used by businesses, how this is linked to innovation and what challenges prevent wider use of HPC in the business sector.

HPCwire: In a nutshell, what did you find?

Tichenor: First and foremost, we found that for companies that rely on it today, HPC is absolutely essential to business survival. It's not just a "nice to have" tool. We also identified some challenges to more widespread adoption of HPC by business organizations. There's a need for more production-quality application software, for better interfaces, and for more people who know how to use HPC as a production tool. Businesses are telling us that access to talent is a pacing item. This brought us to the issue of education and how to make people more comfortable using HPC.

HPCwire: Was any of this surprising?

Tichenor: Some people who've been immersed in HPC for years have understood the situation, but our studies were the first in-depth, market-based research findings on this topic, and they surprised many people. A lot of thinking in HPC has been focused on how to build better computer systems. The Council is more interested in how these systems can be used most effectively to drive business success and competitiveness.

Unfortunately, HPC is still a niche market within the overall computing market. Our research looked at the full spectrum of HPC users and discovered a bimodal pattern. There is a small group of high-end users and a much larger group of entry-level users, but not many in the middle. We call this gap in the spectrum the "missing middle." There is another large group of people who are doing technical computing on the desktop, but haven't used HPC and don't understand its benefits. We call this group the "never evers." The Council is not only trying to address the important needs of high-end HPC users, we are also focusing on how to fill the "missing middle" and how to encourage the "never evers" to adopt HPC for greater competitiveness.

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