This IDC Insight discusses the November 1 announcement that a leading U.S. designer of supercomputers has decided to move to China to build his next generation of computers, due to difficulties in locating funding and support within the United States. This document looks at the impacts of this event and asks a number of questions about how it may affect the HPC computer industry.

Attracting a leading supercomputer designer like Chen is good news for the growing Chinese computer industry. China has recently been primarily focusing its high-performance technical computer designs on commodity component clusters. In general, clusters provide very attractive price-performance but lack some of the high-end capabilities provided by traditional supercomputers. Chen plans to bridge the gap by building high-performance blade-based clusters in China and offering them for sale around the world.