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.

This study benchmarks the U.S. aerospace, automotive, bio-life sciences and energy industries’ use of high performance computing (HPC) to drive innovation for global competitiveness. It is the first study to attempt to do this and to understand how deeply within each industry’s supply chain HPC has been embraced.

The most noteworthy finding was that U.S. tier 1 energy firms are outpacing other U.S. industries in integrating HPC into critical business functions. The most unexpected finding was that few suppliers to U.S. tier 1 companies in the surveyed industries use HPC (or even desktop workstations) today.

Researchers at the Salk Institute are using supercomputers at the nearby NSF-funded San Diego Supercomputer Center to investigate how the synapses of the brain work. Their research has the potential to help people suffering from mental disorders such as Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and manic depressive disorders. In addition, the use of supercomputers is helping to change the very nature of biology—from a science that has relied primarily on observation to a science that relies on high performance computing to achieve previously impossible in-depth quantitative results.

To conduct leading edge astrophysical research, educate the public, and create its spectacular and highly popular shows based on real science, the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium augments its own computing with the extensive supercomputer capabilities available through the National Science Foundation high performance computing Centers, such as the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

This regional report examines the composition and performance of the Atlanta-Columbus regional economy, how industry clusters developed and innovation arose, how clusters affected the region’s economic future, and how the region can establish a strategy and action program to drive its economy and clusters forward. The framework employed and the lessons learned apply to many regions of the country.

This regional report examines the composition and performance of the Pittsburgh regional economy, how industry clusters developed and innovation arose, how clusters affected the region’s economic future, and how the region can establish a strategy and action program to drive its economy and clusters forward. The framework employed and the lessons learned apply to many regions of the country.