Senate Hearings on High Performance Computing

"On behalf of IBM, I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman for the opportunity to testify.  I am Vice President for Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM, and have been involved with supercomputing initiatives for over twenty years.  With your permission, I will simply summarize my written testimony."

Link to Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Senate Hearings on High Performance Computing

Ok, fair warning. Very dry political stuff, and USA stuff to boot...but these deliberations and their outcomes will directly affect our computing activities here, even in Northern Ontario...in fact, given some of our current research projects, this stuff is more relevant to us than you would think.

Now I wonder how such activities will be affected by some of the trends to grid computing and initiatives like Amazon's EC2, mentioned last week. Again, as mentioned before, the types of problems that these supercomputers can tackle are not necessarily the same as those that can be handled by grid computing. And this is all very different from having the best Pentium chip in your desktop! But politicians don't always draw such distinctions...so supercomputing funding may suffer, especially with the current US administration and its lack of understanding of such complex issues.

And this, I guess, is the point of Irving's presentation. That supercomputing companies need to keep business efficiency, costs etc in mind.