Hey sees a future for scientific programming, although, for instance, the HPF and Fortran compiler market never will be large. As a good example of what can be done, Hey mentioned, Promenvir, an industrial metacomputing example. They distributed their problem to a number of systems all over Europe and were able to get a speed-up of over 100. He believes that for a limited number of applications these distributed metacomputing systems will be a good solution. Another example is the Toolshed project.
Industry has a whole design cycle of which simulation is only a small part.
It is a bit like Amdahl's law when you reduce the simulation time to zero, you still have all the other stuff. Toolshed was linkeing the designer to the simulation. So it was all transparant for him. So these interesting projects do show that high-performance computing has a future. One problem you come across when you want to run on a number of machines all over Europe is licenses.