And The Survey Says

This past July, the second annual HPC Users Conference (http://www.hpcusersconference.com/) was held in Washington, DC. The conference is co-sponsored by The Council on Competitiveness (see sidebar), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration, and Office of Science, and the National Science Foundation. The Council on Competitiveness has identified high-performance computing (HPC) as a key competitive factor for the future. As they rightly state, “If we are to outcompete, we must out-compute.”

Aside from a one day meeting with interesting speakers, the Council on Competitiveness and DARPA also sponsor surveys of the HPC industry. The surveys are done by IDC, and normally you would pay a non-trivial amount of cash for the survey results. Fortunately, though, the survey results are freely available. (URLs are given below.)

The first survey (see http://compete.org/pdf/HPC_Users_Survey.pdf), issued in 2004, looked at HPC in use in industry. For those that missed that report, its major findings were: