An essential springboard for tomorrow’s growth

D. Lamouche Today’s fault lines – globalization, revolutions in digital technology, nanotechnologies, biotechnologies and the environmental challenge –will become the main driving forces in the world that emerges from this recession. Innovation will be the key to success in this new world order. High-performance computing (HPC) enables the most complex equations to be solved and highly sophisticated models to be analyzed; opening up new perspectives for companies, reaching out to all sectors, from healthcare to energy, agronomy to finance, transport to construction. HPC is proving to be an essential tool… provided that the three major obstacles to its development are overcome.
To begin with, this is a technological and industrial challenge. In the world of HPC, the appetite for computing power cannot be met by ever-larger architectures. Major companies’ demands are evolving, and technology suppliers are constantly running to catch up.

Creating a new European ecosystem
It’s quite simple – the current performance of supercomputers is still not enough, despite the fact that demand for computing power is growing constantly, in line with the market. HPC is strategic when it comes to growth, innovation, even State sovereignty; and the Europe ‘arm’ of the global system cannot just rely on external know-how, it needs to actively assert its own technological expertise and come up with stepchange solutions. Now is the right time to create a truly European ecosystem, bringing together suppliers of computing technologies, customers and users. The high-performance computing revolution needs to be a shared challenge, even more so in a ‘systematized’ global economy.