Focus on using Titan for innovation in partnership between government and industry
Fortune magazine profiled industrial use of HPC at OLCF, and several industrial users, in their annual, flagship Fortune 500 issue.
Becky Quick, Fortune contributor and co-anchor of CNBC’s financial news show “Squawk Box” lauded these industrial partnerships for contributing new knowledge to the scientific community, stimulating innovation and sparking a more competitive marketplace.
Quick pointed out that OLCF industrial partnership program users Ford, GE and Procter & Gamble all sought assistance in solving difficult problems. Procter & Gamble, who worked on OLCF’s Jaguar system, explained that access to OLCF resources brought new understanding about the chemistry of its Head & Shoulders shampoo, leading to a more effective formula. Their new insights about how molecules self-organize will also be useful information for pharmaceutical research.
Quick notes that the high price of systems like Titan—$100 million—makes them too expensive for lone corporations, but those corporations often need high-end supercomputing systems to make strides in research and development.
Providing these firms access to OLCF supercomputing resources in a public-private partnership can help drive that private sector R&D for economic development. And because companies must make public the results of their research, the broader scientific community benefits too.—by Leah Moore
