Most experience on parallel machines has been with academic and research problems. However, the field can only realize its full potential and be commercially successful if it is accepted in the real world of industry and government applications. Some of these are seen in the grand challenges described earlier.
However, more generally, parallel computing offers U.S. industry the opportunity of a global competitive advantage. This is a technology where the U.S. has a clear lead over Europe and Japan, and this technology leadership can be turned into a potent ``weapon'' in the global economic ``war'' we expect in the 1990s.
We have explored industrial applications of HPCC, and this is discussed in another article in this book. This work---funded by a New York State technology transfer activity, InfoMall---emphasizes that we expect that the dominant industrial use of MPPs will be in information related areas with large-scale MPP numerical simulations playing a secondary role.