Madagascar's Penguins Release Supercomputers into the Wild; DreamWorks Animation Lends Characters to Council on Competitiveness to Showcase HPC Use in Daily Lives.

WASHINGTON -- The Council on Competitiveness, a national organization of business, academic and labor executives, today announced that the popular Penguin characters from the hit movie "Madagascar" will be appearing in a video at the Second Annual High Performance Computing (HPC) Users Conference. The video by DreamWorks Animation depicts how HPC impacts the daily life of the average consumer and will be shown for the first time at the conference on July 13 in Washington, D.C. For more information on the conference and its speakers visit the HPC Users Conference's website at www.hpcusersconference.com.

From medicine to consumer products, from energy security to aerospace, the video will help illustrate the importance of HPC in breakthrough innovation, and demonstrate the need for continued funding and support. The Council worked with companies, universities and national laboratories to reveal how HPC is behind many of the products and services that we take for granted in everyday life. Contributors included: Boeing, Chevron, DaimlerChrysler, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Ford, IBM, Intel, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ohio Supercomputer Center, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Procter & Gamble, Sandia National Laboratories, SGI and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

At the conference, leaders from industry, academia and the national laboratories will discuss grand challenge problems whose solutions could have a significant impact on competitiveness if more computational capability were available. Panelists will also address the challenges of creating, using, and maintaining application software suitable for a competitive, corporate "production" environment, and the role of universities and national laboratories in helping accelerate development of new and/or updated code. The Second Annual HPC Users Conference is co-sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. All media interested in attending should RSVP to [e-mail]. Press credentials required for admittance.

About The Council on Competitiveness

An organization of the top business, university and labor leaders in the United States, the Council on Competitiveness is responsible for influencing the course of American competitiveness on regional, national and global scales. The Council stands unique in its ability to anticipate and respond to changing economic conditions through a series of comprehensive programs to maintain competitiveness and security, support innovation, benchmark national competitiveness and shape public policy. The Council is available on the Web at http://www.compete.org.