Will it be funded? If so, how? Look to government grants (directly or via supercomputing centres)? Charge the customers for support and feature creation? Ha

Will it be funded? If so, how? Look to government grants (directly or via supercomputing centres)? Charge the customers for support and feature creation? Have a commercial tier? Unless you’re going to do it with grad students and volunteers, it’s going to need money. Governments might be less interested in non-novel software. (Small) commercial concerns are active in a number of areas that have FOSS software, so any effort has to compete with them. And, ideally, compete on better than “cheaper”.