Alcoa, the world’s leading producer of aluminum products, was one of the first companies to make major use of high performance computing when it became the NSF-funded Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s first industrial affiliate in 1987. When aluminum faced growing competition from plastic and other composite materials, the company used the PSC supercomputer to handle the complex modeling and simulations needed to get the jump on their competitors by successfully redesigning cans for the beverage industry and a variety of components for the automotive, aerospace, building and construction industries.

This collaborative study was conducted by the Council on Competitiveness and IDC on behalf of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The study explores the experiences of 40 users of NSF-funded University HPC Centers to determine how to improve these partnerships in the future.

This collaborative study was conducted by the Council on Competitiveness and IDC on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration (DEO/NNSA). The study looks at the experiences of industrial companies with NNSA Office of Advance Simulation and Computing Alliance Centers.

The Council on Competitiveness is pleased to announce the release of the popular video showcasing how high performance computing (HPC) impacts everyday life, starring the humorous penguin characters from the hit DreamWorks Animation movie Madagascar.

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. 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.

The Council on Competitiveness performed the first-ever comprehensive study of independent software vendors (ISVs) serving the high performance computing (HPC) market in 2005. Part A of this two-part study reflects the opinions and insights of more than 100 independent software vendors.