John Furrier speaking with John Hengeveld, Directory of Marketing, HPC for Intel at Intel Developer Forum, 2012.

John Hengeveld, the head of marketing for Intel’s supercomputer business, discussed high-performance computing, innovation and big data with John Furrier at the annual Intel Develop Forum conference.

Hengeveld, stressing this year’s slogan  “in order to be blue you have to be green,” said that today his unit is all about delivering the most performance per watt.  He then went in great detail about how organizations are using Intel’s HPC solutions to innovate across almost all verticals.

Hengeveld’s take is that high-performance computing impacts the life of every person on the planet, going on to justify his claim.

On one end, a manufacturer may run a compact HPC environment to calculate the optimal parameters for bending sheets of metal to a certain specification. On the other end, Stephan Hawking’s COSMOS Group at Oxford is currently leveraging a large deployment to gain a better understanding of physics and the origins of the universe.

Hengeveld says that it’s the relatively small supercomputers that drive innovation today. He gave yet another example of a web-based service powered by Intel that helps users extend battery life.

The chipmaker is helping organizations putting compute into much more serious uses as well. The marketing director says that Intel’s infrastructure enabled the creation of the Cancer Genome Atlas – a source for genetic results from patients and tumors.  Academia is using the atlas as a source to develop treatments that target mutated cells but leave the healthy ones unhurt.

This scale of research has only become a practical feat in the past five years, the executive says. The cost associated with this type of work has been reduced by a factor of 1000 in that period of time thanks to Moore’s law and better analytical tools, which according to Hengeveld are accelerating at a faster rater than the former.