The Council on Competitiveness performed the first-ever comprehensive study of independent software vendors (ISVs) serving the high performance computing (HPC) market in 2005. Leading technology analyst firm IDC completed the study gathering current information on 54 of the most important ISV organizations and 110 applications software packages used across a variety of industries. The study assess the current capabilities of ISV applications software for the HPC community, the business models and financial resources standing behind this software, ISVs’ readiness for petascale computing, and barriers to future software development.

Part A of this two-part study reflects the opinions and insights of more than 100 independent software vendors. See Part B for end user perspectives on these issues.

“The impetus for this important study came from the Council’s 2004 survey that examined the importance of HPC to industrial competitiveness. That survey also identified software issues as a significant barrier to more aggressive use,” said Suzy Tichenor, vice president of the Council on Competitiveness. “The current study revealed what many of us suspected; that while HPC systems are available with hundreds, thousands or (soon) tens of thousands of processors, few ISV applications today ‘scale’ beyond 100 processors, and many of the most used codes scale to only a few processors in practice. This is a serious impediment to business competitiveness.”

The survey goes on to reveal that without external funding and expertise, it is doubtful that ISVs will have application software that can take advantage of petascale systems when they are available in the market.