Economic Competitiveness in the 21st Century—Cyberinfrastructure

By Dr. Cynthia R. McIntyre - Senior Vice President - U. S. Council on Competitiveness

Cyberinfrastructure is critically important for national economic growth and competitiveness in the 21st century global marketplace. Indeed, technological infrastructure must be part of any national strategy to grow and enhance innovation capacity in the private and public sectors. National economic growth will increasingly depend on expanding the innovation capacity not just of large multinational corporations but of small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) as well. Increasingly, governments must help enable their private sectors – and especially SMEs – to be competitive domestically and globally in order to preserve and create jobs.
Computational infrastructure is a key enabler of innovation and competitiveness in research, development, manufacturing, and services. Among other things, pervasive access to high speed broadband, high performance computing, application software, and intellectual capital will propel businesses forward. In particular, SMEs will be resilient and sustainable only if they are able to design and adapt products and services quickly enough to meet customer demands, have adequate broadband connectivity to expedite critical processes, and have access to the kind of talent capable of capitalizing on these technologies.
In the United States, public-private partnerships have long served to advance science and engineering research and development. After all, no one entity has all the needed expertise and infrastructure to solve science and engineering problems of importance. Encouraging collaboration on scientific, engineering, and computational problems across sectors is key to successful research, development and deployment activities.
A good recent example of such a partnership is the successful collaboration between the Goodyear Tyre and Rubber Company and Sandia National Laboratories.
In 2003 and 2004, the Goodyear Tyre and Rubber Company found itself in a definite slump, suffering declining revenues and losing out to its two main competitors, Michelin and Bridgestone. In response, Goodyear leveraged its high performance computer clusters and its ongoing collaborative relationship with the United States Department of Energy Sandia National Laboratories to change the way it developed tyres. Rather than designing, building and testing physical prototypes, Goodyear engineers used modeling and simulation to test virtual models and significantly cut their time-to-market. The result was the Assurance® all-weather tyre featuring
TripleTred Technology®, a huge hit that helped Goodyear not only climb out of the hole it was in, but continue on to launch a flurry of new tyres that resulted in record profits.
Additionally, companies as diverse as PING Golf, DreamWorks Animation SKG, Motorola, Woodward Control Solutions, and others are using computational assets and external science, engineering, and computational expertise to solve R & D problems.
Other regions are catching on to the power of computational modeling and simulation as well. The European Union, through collaborative vehicles like PRACE and DEISA, is building a strong collaborative research infrastructure for industry and academe to utilize supercomputing assets. Meanwhile, many more countries, both in developed and emerging markets, have acquired or are developing supercomputing assets to be competitive in academic and industrial research.
The South Africa Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is a leading supercomputing Centre as evidenced by supercomputing’s Top 500 List. World-class scientific research activity was highlighted during the CHPC annual meeting in December 2009. An expansive broadband network, the South African National Research Network, announced in September 2009, is planned to fully connect the academic and research institutions to CHPC to enhance research collaborations. With these major milestones accomplished, CHPC can broaden its impact on the South African economy.
One of the CHPC mandates is to affect socioeconomic conditions in South Africa. Toward this goal, the Center can make major contributions to South Africa industrial research for economic growth, competitiveness, job preservation and creation. Industries as diverse as mining, manufacturing, biotechnology, and healthcare companies have research and development programs that can leverage CHPC assets to achieve their R&D goals.
As CHPC extends its research partnerships to the industrial community, it will connect the academic and research community with industry for collaboration. This broader collaboration will have influence beyond the immediate research activity. It will also be a pathway for university students engaged in the research to find employment after graduating. Additionally, this research collaboration can spur new business and job creation as new products or start-up companies are envisioned.
CHPC enables South African scientists, who are investigating some of the most intractable grand scientific challenges of climate change, energy, natural resources, and global health to have rapid access to one of the most powerful research tools in the world. These problems can only be solved through public policy
and public investment in research and development.
Excellence in research has guided South Africa’s science and engineering community. Now, South Africa has the world-class cyberinfrastructure and computational research tools to meet these new challenges  from atoms on up to the global enterprise.