As personal computers get sleeker, cheaper and easier to use, a national effort is emerging to convince more U.S. businesses that they must harness the power of bulkier, pricier and still largely mysterious supercomputers if they want to compete.

Software makers are trying to simplify codes, Congress is considering special incentives and the animated penguins from the movie “Madagascar” are singing the technology’s praises.

To demystify the boxy, room-filling machines that cost anywhere from $100,000 to hundreds of millions of dollars, DreamWorks Animation SKG enlisted its intrepid penguins, characters brought to 3-D life by supercomputers. The video describes how high-performance computing helped NASA pinpoint the cause of the Columbia space shuttle disaster and let Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co. design a more aerodynamic Pringle to stop a costly problem – air currents were sweeping the chips off their high-speed production lines.

Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest consumer product manufacturer with brands such as Gillette, Charmin and Pampers, employs hundreds of programmers and technicians to run its own supercomputer for research and development.

“We spend $1.8 billion on R&D, but we can afford it; it’s purely scale,” said Thomas Lange, director of modeling and simulation. “But it’s important for our suppliers to innovate, too.”

The effort to make supercomputing accessible to even mom-and-pop shops is exciting but faces significant challenges, said Reza Sadeghi, vice president of one of the largest independent software companies, Santa Ana, Calif.-based MSC Software Corp.

Also, supercomputer software is far more complex than the applications used on a personal computer, and only a few industry leaders have been willing to invest to overcome the software hurdle, said William J. Camp of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.

Plastic Technologies Inc., a plastic bottle maker based in Holland, Ohio, is one company that recognizes the benefit of supercomputing in being first to market with the best designs, but wants to see better and cheaper access to the technology.

To get more power, a company can tap into more supercomputer processors, but there are diminishing returns – four processors are not four times more powerful than one, said Sumit Mukherjee, a computer specialist at Plastic Technologies.

In addition, the manufacturer’s desktop computers aren’t powerful enough to handle all the data produced from rented time on a supercomputer. It would probably take 20 companies in the area sharing time on a supercomputer to make it worthwhile, but then there are concerns about data security, Mukherjee said.

Finally, there is a psychological barrier to supercomputing.

“Some people still consider high-performance computing beyond their reach and capacity, and we still have to invest significantly to solve that,” Sadeghi said.

Desktop computers became so powerful in the 1990s that most private industries made clusters of them their operational backbone, replacing mainframes. Today’s supercomputers can perform tasks hundreds of thousands of times faster than even the fastest desktop models but continue to remind people of outdated monstrosities, Lange said.

The Council on Competitiveness, a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes technological innovation, believes the U.S. will lose its global edge if that perception doesn’t change.

“The country that out-computes will be the one that out-competes,” said Suzy Tichenor, the council’s vice president.

In recent years, Japan made it a priority to let industry take advantage of the supercomputers developed in government laboratories. Chinese companies have begun purchasing some of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

The U.S. response was slower. A 2005 report by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences urged Congress to act. This year, President Bush amplified that by promoting greater use of supercomputing in his State of the Union address.

Government and university computer laboratories have begun, slowly, to let businesses tap into their supercomputers or technical expertise.

Sandia National Laboratories had a partnership with Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., to help the Akron, Ohio-based company decode and customize software. Goodyear was able to use its own supercomputer to create simulated tire models instead of costly physical prototypes.

A Department of Energy program last year awarded researchers and companies, including Boeing Co., DreamWorks, General Atomics Co. and Pratt & Whitney, a total of 18.2 million hours of computing time at five government labs.

The $9 million-a-year Ohio Supercomputer Center’s Blue Collar Computing program was started to extend the invitation to smaller companies, and proposed federal legislation seeks to use that model nationwide.

While Plastic Technologies has balked at the Blue Collar Computing offer, manufacturing groups such as the Edison Welding Institute in Columbus and the Ohio Aerospace Institute in Cleveland have let some of their members rent time on the Ohio center’s supercomputer.

Sens. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and Herb Kohl, D-Wis., have proposed legislation to spend $25 million a year for five years to fund five similar centers across the country. Existing centers, including the Ohio one, would compete for the federal funding and a designation as a national supercomputing resource center.

“It’s supercomputing for the rest of us,” said Stanley Ahalt, the center’s executive director.