In the Council’s 2004 study of U.S. industrial HPC users, nearly 100 percent of the respondents indicated that they considered HPC to be indispensable to their organizations. These companies stated that they would not exist as viable businesses and could not compete effectively without HPC tools. At the same time, these users identified a growing gap between the production quality, HPC application software that is needed and the software that is available. Some firms are highly dependent on legacy codes that are difficult to replace. Also, organizations in the private sector often are unable to scale their code to the capabilities of their hardware. As a result, productivity and competitiveness are stymied as both cutting edge innovations are stalled and users struggle to expand HPC usage by embedding it into their work processes.

In order to better understand the reasons why this gap has emerged, the Council on Competitiveness and the Ohio Supercomputer Center co-hosted a day-long workshop: Accelerating Innovation For Competitive Advantage: The Need For HPC Application Software Solutions. Participants examined the effectiveness of current HPC application software business models, as well as technical and resource barriers preventing the production of more usable application software. In a collaborative atmosphere, they outlined a roadmap of actions independent software vendors, universities and government research establishments can take individually and collectively to address these barriers and ensure that our country has the application software needed to solve our most competitively important problems.

This workshop examined the gap between the production-quality, application software that industry needs and the software that is available. The report offers a roadmap of public-private sector actions to address this challenge. Participants included HPC users, independent software vendors (ISVs), university researchers, hardware vendors, and government scientists and engineers.