"Traditional CIOs need more of the kinds of skills that before were only found in the HPC world," said Wladawsky-Berger.

Micah Nerren, an HPC consultant at Mach1 Computing in Irving, Calif., said he often works as a go-between for IT and HPC compute cluster groups that don't have the management skills or necessarily know how best to integrate their systems with the business. "You have to educate them a bit about how to coexist peacefully ... and educate IT [about] why this is a unique user," he said.