Yes but the issue is all the performance doesn't matter if your researchers aren't using it to solve problems. See http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/hpcs/ for more info on this. This is the big HPC push that IBM, Cray, and SUN are participating in. Also a company that I think is kinda cool http://www.orionmulti.com/ is working on a very common use of HPC tools by non-computer people. They are very focused on providing easy to use ultra low maintainance computational tools primarially for the bio-informatics community. One of the founders of the company worked an LANL on green-desitiny (or something like that) which was designed to be a low power low maintainance super computing resource at LANL. After all that, the short answer is yes performance is important but there is a lot of work and interest in making sure that this performance can actually be used by the people that are actually solving problems. Mark