The democratization of the supercomputers

You may wonder why a company would want to use supercomputers, or high-performance computing (HPC), to make shampoos. But that's exactly what a European cosmetics company did to get the right mix of materials that would make the shampoo smooth. "Nobody wants to buy shampoo that is not stable--one in which ingredients get segregated like in a salad dressing so you have to shake it before you can use it," said Dave Turek, who leads HPC (high performance computing) strategy at International Business Machines (IBM) Corp., which worked with the shampoo maker on devising a cost-efficient HPC solution. According to Turek, ordinarily, one would start the shampoo-making process by getting a laboratory to mix the ingredients (water, detergent, thickeners, etc.), testing them and checking the mixture's properties like how it "behaves, sitting on the shelf" of a bathroom. "This will teach you something about the ratio of materials, and then you do another set of experiments with another ratio and so on."