Things I have said (or have been attributed as saying - not always the same thing!) - some older interviews with me in various publications about HPC, multicore, etc ...
Successful Deployment at Extreme Scale: More than Just the Iron
The Exascale Report
August 2010, by John West
[full article requires subscription, extracts here are not complete, and are modified slightly to support that]
"cost of science, not just the cost of supercomputer ownership"
"lead time, and funding, to get the user community ready"
"spend a year or more selecting a machine and then deploy it as quickly as possible, makes it very difficult to build a community and get codes ready ahead of time"
"software must be viewed as part of the scientific instrument, in this case a supercomputer, that needs its own investment. High performance computing is really about the software; whatever hardware you are using is just an accelerator system."
"a machine is deployed and then obsolete within three years. And the users often have no idea what architecture is coming next. There is no real chance for planning, or a return on software development investment."