Price/performance improvements, due in part to systems using x86-based chips, are making supercomputing more accessible to businesses, according to vendors. The Top500 supercomputer list, released earlier Monday at the show, showed large gains in the use of commodity chips.

Dave Turek, vice president of IBM Deep Computing, said demand for supercomputing is being driven by a number of forces, including the creation of new businesses that rely heavily on high-performance systems, such as digital animation and bioinformatics. Supercomputing 'is also being driven by vast amounts of data that demand rapid analysis for real-time decision-making,' he said.

Turek pointed in particular to RFID-enabled devices, which can be used to track product shipments, as capable of 'generating huge amounts of data.'

While enterprise vendors are making capacity-on-demand systems available for processing large amounts of data, Turek doesn't believe those systems will account for more than 10 percent of the market.

Ed Turkel, manager of product marketing and high performance computing at Hewlett-Packard Co., said high-performance clusters, ranging from 32 to 64 nodes (a node is typically a two-processor system), are being increasingly adopted in industrial markets. Microsoft offers its own cluster product, which Turkel believes will help HP sell high-performance clusters to more commercial users.