APPLICATIONS

The Council on Competitiveness, a national organization of business, academic and labor executives, announced the completion of the first-ever comprehensive study of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) serving the supercomputing users. Leading technology analyst firm IDC completed the study gathering current information on 54 of the most important ISV organizations and 110 applications software packages used across a variety of industries. The study assess the current capabilities of ISV applications software for the High Performance Computing community, the business models and financial resources standing behind this software, ISVs' readiness for petascale computing, and barriers to future software development. The results of the study will be announced and discussed at the Council's Second Annual HPC Users Conference in Washington D.C. on July 13, followed by the release of a CD directory of the full survey data. For more information on the conference and its speakers visit the HPC Users Conference's website. "The impetus for this important study came from the Council's 2004 survey that examined the importance of HPC to industrial competitiveness. That survey also identified software issues as a significant barrier to more aggressive use," said Suzy Tichenor, vice president of the Council on Competitiveness. "The current study revealed what many of us suspected, that while HPC systems are available with hundreds, thousands, or (soon) tens of thousands of processors, few ISV applications today 'scale' beyond 100 processors and many of the most used codes scale to only a few processors in practice. This is a serious impediment to business competitiveness." The survey goes on to reveal that without external funding and expertise, it is doubtful that ISVs will have application software that can take advantage of petascale systems when they are available in the market. Through intensive phone and Internet research, IDC gathered current information on 54 of the most important ISV organizations and 110 applications software packages, as well as 20 key suppliers of 64 middleware software solutions. The information gathered extends well beyond basic census data on the ISV organizations themselves to cover which industries they sell to, when their applications were last updated, technical challenges, as well as information useful for fostering collaborations aimed at improving the scalability of the ISV applications. Second Annual HPC Users Conference At the conference, leaders from industry, academia and the national laboratories will discuss grand challenge problems whose solutions could have a significant impact on competitiveness if more computational capability were available. Panelists will also address the challenges of creating, using, and maintaining application software suitable for a competitive, corporate "production" environment, and the role of universities and national laboratories in helping accelerate development of new and/or updated code. The Second Annual HPC Users Conference is co-sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.