Supers for Competitiveness
Large U.S. corporations are painstakingly slow, reluctant shoppers when it comes to big, traditional computers like supercomputers, mainframes, and even minisupercomputers. It took three years, for example, for a leading U.S. chemical company to decide to spring for a multimillion-dollar CRAY X-MP. And the entire U.S. automotive industry, which abounds in problems like crashworthiness studies that are ideal candidates for high-performance computers, has less supercomputer power than just one of its Japanese competitors. The super is right for the Japanese organization because a facility can be installed rapidly and in a top-down fashion.
U.S. corporations are less slow to adopt distributed computing by default. A small, creative, and productive part of the organization can and does purchase small machines to enhance their productivity. Thus, the one to 10 per cent of the U.S.-based organization that is responsible for 90 to 95 per cent of a corporation's output can and does benefit. For example, today, almost all electronic CAD is done using workstations, and the product gestation time is reduced for those companies who use these modern tools. A similar revolution in design awaits other engineering disciplines such as mechanical engineering and chemistry—but they must start.
The great gain for productivity is by visualization that comes through interactive supercomputing substitutes, including the personal supercomputers that will appear in the next few years. A supercomputer is likely to increase the corporate bureaucracy and at the same time inhibit users from buying the right computer—the very users who must produce the results!
By far, the greatest limitation in the use of supercomputing is training. The computer-science community, which, by default, takes on much of the training for computer programming, is not involved in supercomputing. Only now are departments becoming interested in the highly parallel computers that will form the basis of this next (fifth) generation of computing.