Wal-Mart, P&G and other large users have no problem pointing to the benefits of high-performance systems in bringing products to market and helping them manage their business operations. Nonetheless, attendees at a conference in Washington, D.C., this week said that major barriers remain to widespread use of the technology.

The list of hurdles they cited includes the lingering presence of legacy code that hasn't been adapted for newer low-cost hardware, plus a lack of IT workers with the right skills, the inability of many smaller companies to afford high-performance systems and the need for middleware that could be used to adapt complex computational codes to broader business uses.

Thomas Lange, director of the modeling and simulation program in P&G's corporate research and development unit, said high-performance systems aren't being widely used outside of automotive and aerospace supply chains. The lack of adoption applies to P&G's own supply chain, he said.

Lange and other proponents at yesterday's third annual High-Performance Computing Users Conference said they hope that increasing pressure on companies to shorten their time to market for new products and squeeze out costs will help usher in broader use of HPC technology.

"We're not going to set criteria [for suppliers] to use HPC," Lange said. "We're going to use the standard market forces that are present."