This is a continuation of our look at future trends in high performance computing. In part 1 we covered the first five of the top ten trends. In this installment we’ll wrap up with the remaining five.

As we near the end of 2011, we take a moment to reflect on the past year. It’s been a busy year for IT across virtually all verticals, from mobile and search to enterprise servers and cloud computing. When we attended HPC360 a few weeks ago, we had the pleasure to attend a keynote presentation by Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect Research in which he discussed the most important trends in high performance computing (HPC).

Miles south of Chicago, amid the wind-swept flatlands of central Illinois, is the home of perhaps the world’s next fastest supercomputer. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, which is co-developing the Blue Waters supercomputer, is today at the forefront of petascale computing. But 25 years ago, when the Center revved up its first machine, the computing world looked much different.

Supercomputers have become a vital part of almost any innovative project undertaken by collaborative teams in the developed world. Server clusters can be found anywhere from the offices of small businesses to compartments in U.S. Navy submarines.