NCSA to Examine Effective Practices in Industrial HPC

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Merle Giles, NCSA

Merle Giles, NCSA

The NSF has awarded $300K to NCSA to examine effective practices in industrial HPC. Led by Principal Investigator Merle Giles, the project will identify, document, and analyze effective practices in establishing public-private partnerships between High Performance Computing (HPC) centers and industry. With the market analysis firm IDC, the project will conduct a worldwide in-depth survey of 70-80 example partnerships of HPC centers of various sizes, in the US and elsewhere, that have been involved in partnerships with the private-sector.

The project is important to our national economic competitiveness because prior studies have shown that the use of HPC can boost industrial innovation and competitiveness, benefiting the firms in question and their economies. Additionally, it directly supports the Presidential executive order ‘Creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative’ by addressing one of its key guiding principle to ‘foster public-private collaboration’. In particular, the project outcomes will help HPC centers, whose existence serve as an important nexus in our nation’s HPC hardware, software, and human investments, improve their innovation and effectiveness in engaging industry for knowledge transfer and workforce development.

In summary, the project implementation will have the following scope and goals:

  • Evaluate the nature and status of existing public-private, HPC-centered partnership programs.
  • Collect and analyze practices that have worked well in individual partnerships and in the aggregate, along with practices that have not worked well and issues impending greater success, in order to capture the state-of-the-art and associated best practices in these partnerships
  • Produce and disseminate a quantitative-qualitative report that can serve as a reference guide and compendium of effective practices and lessons learned.

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