[2] The NSL's purpose was to commercialize software and hardware technologies that would overcome computing and data storage bottlenecks.
This collaboration began in the fall of 1992[4] and involved IBM's Houston Global Services and five DOE national labs (Lawrence Berkeley [LBL], LLNL, LANL, ORNL, and SNL).
Therefore, the collaboration set out to design and deploy a system that would scale by a factor of 1,000 or more and evolve from the base above toward these expected targets and beyond.
[5] The HPSS collaboration is based on the premise that no single organization has the experience and resources to meet all the challenges represented by the growing imbalance between computing power and data collection capabilities, and storage system I/O, capacity, and functionality.
Over twenty organizations worldwide including industry, US Department of Energy (DOE), other federal laboratories, universities, National Science Foundation (NSF) supercomputer centers, French Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA), and Gleicher Enterprises have contributed to various aspects of this effort.