The public-private partnerships jump-started by the National Science Foundation through the university supercomputer centers it funds constitute best practice innovation prototypes that will drive America’s competitiveness in the 21st century. They lay the groundwork to leverage High Performance Computing capabilities through collaborative, multidisciplinary networks that are at the cutting edge of innovation leadership.

This collaborative study was conducted by the Council on Competitiveness and IDC on behalf of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The study included 40 users of NSF-funded University HPC Centers and was conducted from December 2005 to January 2006. It evaluates the users’ experiences at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), the San Diego Supercompter Center (SDSC) and the Texas Advance Computing Center (TACC). The study explores how industrial companies have worked with these centers (what worked well and what did not) in order to identify an collect ideas on how to make these partnerships work better in the future.