Hedge fund IT managers were among those who gathered in Portland last week for Supercomputing 09, the annual confab for the supercomputing industry. The financial sector has been one of the strongest growth sectors in the supercomputer industry, driven by the extreme need for computing power, speed and heightened analytical needs, and most think the appeal is still strong on paper anyway.

The good news is that the supercomputer of tomorrow will be much more powerful than the supercomputer of today. The best bet for the industry to really get a grip on hedge funds and other financial services firms might be through cloud computing, however. Hedge funds seem reluctant to develop their massive supercomputing facilities, but one would hope that as more clouds--public, private or hybrid-- adopt the technology, the programming and other hurdles will also decline. At some point, the top dogs have to get used to the idea. If a cloud provider can make the economics work by offering massive power at very low cost, they'll likely win some converts. Amazon, a looming cloud power, has been working hard toward winning hedge fund converts.

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