High performance computing (HPC) has been and will continue to be a key ingredient in America’s innovation capacity. It accelerates the innovation process by shrinking “time-to-insight” and “time-to-solution” for both discovery and invention. Along with theory and experimentation, modeling and simulation with high performance computers has become the third leg of science and the path to competitive advantage. But the country is only beginning to tap the potential competitiveness benefits of this promising technology – and in this increasingly competitive global environment, out-compete will increasingly mean out-compute.

Keeping the Lifeblood Flowing: Boosting Oil and Gas Recovery from the Earth, sponsored by the Department of Energy Office of Science, provides additional evidence, along with concrete and quantifiable assessments, of the economic benefits of HPC-driven innovation. This report is one of five in this first series of grand challenge studies describing some of the “what if” questions that HPC can address and the new opportunities for economic growth it can create. The grand challenge studies focus on the oil and gas, chemical, and auto industries.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg of HPC’s potential to transform America’s competitiveness. As Dr. John H. Marburger III, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy stated, “We are approaching a ‘tipping point’ beyond which entirely new applications of computing will bring a new wave of transformations in our industrial way of life, and further disrupt older ways of doing business.” Today, extraordinary vision is required to reach this point. “High performance computing extends the horizon of applications beyond the range of our imagination.”

With these case studies, the Council on Competitiveness hopes to broaden the understanding and appreciation of the critical importance of high performance computing in America, reveal its potential to transform our economy by accelerating the innovation process, and help a wide range of industries reach for the horizon.