Nvidia itself was basically bankrolled by DoE labs for much of it's early existence, MPI was a HPC project driven by Oak Ridge, the WWW was a side project at CERN to simplify information retrieval, etc.

High Energy Physics is a very data and computationally heavy problem that lends itself nicely to HPC, and a lot of the innovations in CS subfields like Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, and Theory was enabled by this research.