The founding mission statements of the Irish Supercomputer List follow, and will be regularly reviewed by the steering and advisory committees:
- To form a central point for HPC installation operators and users in Ireland across all sectors, public and private, including (but not limited to) academic, research, industry and government.
- To improve the awareness of HPC amongst the Irish public.
- To represent and enhance the profile of the HPC landscape domestically and internationally.
- To serve as a globally-facing resource representing Irish HPC, in keeping with both global and national conventions.
- To identify current and emerging trends in Irish HPC, which can then be compared to those identified in global lists.
- To provide a list whose statistics are representative of the Irish HPC landscape, for use by anyone for any purpose.
- To maintain a list whose statistics are not dominated and skewed by a small number of systems at the top end – systems that also often feature expensive, exotic or custom hardware not available to most users of HPC systems.
- To allow any university department, vendor, research group or company to rank on a list of peers, to quantitatively determine their rank, and qualitatively identify and analyse the properties and trends of similar systems, by similar organisations, with similar goals and means.
- To provide a lifetime-long, not time-on-list-long history of system performance. This will be achieved by tracking system performance until decommissioning, not only until failure to attain a specified rank or performance mark.
- To identify hardware and cooling trends that lead to cost effective performance and maximum energy-efficiency.