by Andrew Jones, Vice-President of HPC Business at Numerical Algorithms Group
As we turn the decade into the 2020s, we take a nostalgic look back at the last ten years of supercomputing. It’s amazing to think how much has changed in that time. Many of our older readers will recall how things were before the official Planetary Supercomputing Facilities at Shanghai, Oak Ridge and Saclay were established. Strange as it may seem now, each country — in fact, each university or company — had its own supercomputer!
Hindsight is easier, of course, but it is interesting to review how this major change in supercomputing came to happen over the last few years.
At the start of the decade, each major university, research centre or company using simulation & modelling had its own HPC resources — they owned it or leased it, operated it, housed it, etc. In addition, some countries (US, UK, Germany, etc.) operated their own national resources for open research. The national facilities were larger than individual institutions could afford, and access to these was usually by a mechanism known as “peer review” — the prospective user would write a short case describing how their science would benefit from using the facility and a group of fellow scientists would judge if the science was worthy.
