general idea: how to influence computer design
We had an interesting talk on computer architecture today, and the presenter said that, to her big surprise, a lot of architecture design details are motivated by the National Labs.
Companies like Intel and IBM regularly ask researchers from the national labs about the features these researchers want to see -- since the labs, via Federal funding, are among the main buyers of state-of-the-art high-performance computers. Sometimes, if a minor computer architecture feature is not needed much for a general customer but is useful for national labs, a part of a big grant given to a national lab for solving an important problem goes to the company as a subcontractor to subsidize the company's development of this feature.
From this viewpoint, if we can get a good national lab support for interval computations, this will boost our chances that relevant features will be implemented in hardware.