Innovation

Innovation is a key objective driving Europe strategy to strengthen the worldwide position of its industry and academia.
97% of HPC users consider it indispensable for their ability to innovate, compete, and survive.

Political and organizational leaders are increasingly recognizing HPC’s crucial value for driving innovation and competitiveness.

Commenting on the EU Innovation Union, launched in October 2010, Robert-Jan Smits, Director General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission, noted that:

“…research and innovation are key strands of the Europe 2020 strategy. Stark figures confront this ambition to use knowledge as a driver for sustainable growth. Albeit with large internal variations, Europe consistently spends less than 2 per cent of GDP on research and development, only two-thirds of that in the US and a little more than half the Japanese figure. Meanwhile, China’s investment is growing year by year and will be on a par with Europe in a few years. The EU Innovation Union Scoreboard tells a similar story: a big innovation gap with Japan and the US, with China (not to mention India and Brazil) quickly catching up.”

Other examples:

  • In his 2006 State of the Union address, U.S. President George W. Bush promised to trim the federal budget, yet urged more money for supercomputing. President Obama also mentioned supercomputing prominently in his 2011 State of the Union address.
  • In 2009, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that without more investment in supercomputer technology, Russian products “will not be competitive or of interest to potential buyers.”
  • In June 2010, Rep. Chung Doo-un of South Korea‘s Grand National Party echoed that warning: ―If Korea is to survive in this increasingly competitive world, it must not neglect nurturing the supercomputer industry, which has emerged as a new growth driver in advanced countries.

Industry is in the midst of a new, 21st century industrial revolution driven by the application of computer technology to industrial and business problems. HPC already plays a key role in designing and improving many industrial products — including automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceutical drugs, microprocessors, computers, implantable medical devices, golf clubs, and household appliances — as well as industrial-business processes (e.g., finding and extracting oil and gas, manufacturing consumer products, modeling complex financial scenarios and investment instruments, planning store inventories for large retail chains, creating animated films, and forecasting the weather).

HPC users typically pursue these activities with virtual prototyping and large-scale data modeling – that is,using computers to create digital models of products or processes and then evaluating and improving the design of the products or processes by manipulating these computer models. Given their broad and expanding range of high-value economic activities, HPC users are increasingly crucial for industrial and business innovation, productivity, and competitiveness.

With EESI, ETP4HPC, PRACE to name few, European Commission recognizes the crucial role of HPC to innovation.

The Council asked for a further development of the European High Performance Computing Infrastructure. It recommends to pool national investments and efforts in HPC to succeed in the use, development and manufacturing of advanced computing products, services and technologies.