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Government Intervention Scenarios

 

Of particular interest are the national and international government sponsored programmes such as the European Union's EUROPORT programme, or the UK's Parallel Applications Programme. These programmes provide some degree of matching funding to encourage industry to uptake HPCC and exploit it at a lower cost and lower risk by building consortia of a mix of academics, developers, end-users and potential customers.

Experience at HPCC academic centres in the UK has been particulary favourable with this sort of matching funding. The Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) was originally an academic organization within Edinburgh University formed on the basis of experience in computational physics. The UK Government Department of Trade and Industry initiated the Parallel Application Programme (PAP) as a matching funding programme to bring together academic HPCC code developers and industrial end users, as well as HPCC suppliers. EPCC evolved under relatively modest PAP funding into a flourishing commercially oriented organization and has recently spun off a commercial company to service the growing base of HPCC customers. British companies and other organizations such as: Rolls Royce (CFD for Turbofan simulation); British Aerospace (CEM for radar simulation); British Telecom(communications stacks for network simulation); The UK Home Office(fingerprint recognition); The UK Meteorological Office (weather and climate simulation); AEA Technology(reactor design); British Gas (network optimisation); Ford (parallel databases); Intera Information Technologies Ltd (oil reservior simulation); Shell Exploration and Production (seismic data processing); SIAS Ltd (road traffic simulation) all became customers of EPCC. Many of these projects led to HPCC procurement and uptake by the companies or organizations involved.

The programme matched funding to collaborative projects between EPCC and end-user organizations and also HPCC vendors and ISVs on the basis of how much resources the companies put into the project. This latter was a combination of cash; manpower; software; hardware. Matching funding was typically tapered so that satisfied customers would eventually fund projects entirely out of their own resources. This was a clear incentive for success measured in industrial relevancy and satisfaction rather than other more academic criteria.

The value to EPCC in helping to grow a customer base; to the end-users of subsidising early adoption of HPCC technology; and to the HPCC vendors and ISVs of attracting new customers made the programme highly successful. Other centres in the UK such as the HPC Centre at Southampton University were also successful under the same programme and the European Union's EUROPORT project was driven in part by the clear success of the UK programme.

The USA could benefit from such matching funded programmes rather than simply funding development of what may be unwanted products without pre-established customer bases.



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Geoffrey Fox, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, gcf@npac.syr.edu