6
Recommendations for ISVs:
- Consider pricing changes or moving to a service- based model in order to provide users with software, expertise and access to appropriate HPC hardware.
- Partner with companies that use HPC to run demonstration projects that establish the business value of using HPC.
- Develop easy-to-use interfaces that encourage HPC applications to be integrated into organizational workflows.
Recommendations for Universities:
- Enhance their educational programs in computational science at the undergraduate and graduate levels to meet the needs for skilled technical workers.
- Enhance their understanding of the ISV community's requirements so that they can better leverage their own software research and education agendas to help meet the ISVs' needs where appropriate.
Recommendations for Government:
- Modify research support practices to provide sustained (multi-year) funding for research teams to develop mature research software and algorithms. Related to this, encourage commercialization of suitable software.
- Where open source HPC research codes are being developed, terms of government grants and contracts should more seriously consider BSD model licenses, to enable ISVs to build commercial products based on the codes without jeopardizing the ISVs’ privately created intellectual property.
Conclusions
Implementing these recommendations entails considerable risk to the ISVs, the users, the research community, the government, and investors, but failure to take action may inhibit competitive advances by U.S. companies and place them in jeopardy should other countries or companies capitalize first on the potential for expanded use of HPC.
By leveraging HPC more fully to solve complex, crucial problems, America can unleash a new era of innovation-driven growth, creating new industries and markets, fueling wealth creation and profits, and generating high-value, higher-paying jobs that will raise the standard of living for all citizens.
Acknowledgments The Council on Competitiveness thanks the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the Ohio Supercomputer Center for co-sponsoring the High Performance Computing Application Software Workshop that lead to this article. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, under grant DE-FG26-04NT42101.
References
1The Council on Competitiveness is an organization of the top business, university and labor leaders in the United States responsible for influencing the course of American competitiveness on regional, national and global scales. For additional information about its High Performance Computing project and copies of reports, surveys and case studies, see www.compete.org/hpc .
2Reuther, A., Tichenor, S. "Making the Business Case for High Performance Computing: A Benefit-Cost Analysis Methodology," CTWatch Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 4A, November 2006.
3The conference participants included executives representing independent software vendors, public and private sector HPC users, HPC hardware vendors, and public sector funders of HPC R&D.
4http://www.compete.org. See also Part B: End User Perspectives.
2Reuther, A., Tichenor, S. "Making the Business Case for High Performance Computing: A Benefit-Cost Analysis Methodology," CTWatch Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 4A, November 2006.
3The conference participants included executives representing independent software vendors, public and private sector HPC users, HPC hardware vendors, and public sector funders of HPC R&D.
4http://www.compete.org. See also Part B: End User Perspectives.
