Supercomputing Pushes Toward the Corporate IT Mainstream

Current users cite business gains and call for wider adoption. But some barriers remain -- including a need to convince CIOs to back the technology inside their companies.

By Patrick Thibodeau

November 21, 2005 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - SEATTLE -- Loren Miller, director of IT research, development and engineering at The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., thinks he can easily make the case for wider corporate use of supercomputing technology.
Simulations made possible by supercomputing have enabled Goodyear to gradually reduce the amount of money it spends on building physical tire prototypes, from 40% of its total research and development budget to just 15%, Miller said last week. The Akron, Ohio-based company is using the money it saves to fund more research work.
"From our standpoint, the results have been dramatic," Miller said at the Supercomputing 2005 conference here. Other companies in the U.S. need to realize that they can gain a competitive advantage from high-performance computing systems, he added.
Efforts are under way to broaden the corporate base of supercomputing users. For example, the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) in Columbus has launched a program called Blue Collar Computing that's designed to provide businesses that lack high-performance computing expertise with tools for testing the technology.
And in a speech at last week's conference, Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp.'s chairman and chief software architect, predicted that one day some supercomputers will cost less than $10,000. He also said that "mass computing" and supercomputing share common technical challenges and could benefit from combined R&D efforts.
William Kramer, head of high-performance computing at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., said that Gates' appearance was an indication of the growing awareness of supercomputing's importance. "The output of [high-performance computing] activities are no longer hidden behind a curtain, if you will," said Kramer, the conference's general chairman.
Supercomputing is "being scaled down so more people can make use of these very complicated tools," he added. "And I think that's one of the indications of Microsoft's interest here."


Stanley Ahalt, executive director at the Ohio Supercomputer Center Image Credit: Patrick Thibodeau

Like Gates, Stanley Ahalt, the OSC's executive director, envisions wide-scale use of high-performance systems by companies looking to run complex simulations and visualizations of products during the design and testing process. The OSC, which is beginning to talk with potential commercial users of its systems, hopes to encourage businesses to adopt the technology by offering help as well as access to its supercomputing resources.
Ahalt said he's convinced that supercomputing is critical to improving the competitiveness of U.S.-based companies. But he thinks that many IT managers still aren't even considering the technology.
"CIOs are focused so acutely on the bottom line, they aren't ready for the

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