Attached is an IDC write-up on the National use of High-end HPC for both scientific innovation and economic advancement. It also includes a list of the current petascale systems around the world.
1. INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENTS AND MODELS
How Nations Are Applying High-End Petascale
Supercomputers for Innovation and Economic
Advancement in 2012
Earl C. Joseph, Ph.D. Chirag Dekate, Ph.D.
Steve Conway
IDC OPINION
www.idc.com
There is a growing contingent of nations around the world that are investing
considerable resources to install supercomputers with the potential to reshape how
science and engineering are accomplished. In many cases, the cost of admission for
each supercomputer now exceeds $100 million and could soon reach $1 billion.
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Some countries are laying the groundwork to build "fleets" of these truly large-scale
computers to create a sustainable long-term competitive advantage. In a growing
number of cases, it is becoming a requirement to show or "prove" the return on
investment (ROI) of the supercomputer and/or the entire center. With the current
global economic pressures, nations need to better understand the ROI of making
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these large investments and decide if even larger investments should be made. It's
not an easy path, as there are sizable challenges in implementing these truly super
supercomputers:
Along with the cost of the computers, there are substantial costs for power,
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cooling, and storage.
In most cases, new datacenters have to be built, and often entire new research
organizations are created around the new or expanded mission.
In many situations, the application software needs to be rewritten or even
fundamentally redesigned in order to perform well on these systems.
But the most important ingredient is still the research team. The pool of talent
that can take advantage of these systems is very limited, and competition is
heating up to attract them.
Filing Information: August 2012, IDC #236341, Volume: 1
Technical Computing: Industry Developments and Models