This is a continuation of our look at future trends in high performance computing. In part 1 we covered the first five of the top ten trends. In this installment we’ll wrap up with the remaining five.
Future Trends in HPC, part 2
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Category Archives: Missing Middle
HPC360 Conference Recap
We just returned from R Systems HPC360, a conference on high performance computing down in Champaign, Illinois which brought together leading industry professionals, academics, scientists, and enthusiasts.
The conference was titled HPC360 “Innovation through Modeling and Simulation”. The event took place at the i Hotel and Conference Center in Champaign, hosted by R Systems and sponsored by a number of companies including Dell, AMD, Intel, and yours truly, ICC!
Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) to spur innovation
On June 24, President Obama announced the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) between the federal government, academia, and businesses to help stimulate the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy. We have been following the so-called “Missing Middle” of small- to medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) on this blog, and I’d like to describe some of the recent initiatives to engage this high-potential segment of our economy.
Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University, Obama described that AMP would allocate $500 million of federal money to help make U.S. manufacturing more competitive around the world.
Inspired by a report drafted by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which found that there are market failures in the advanced manufacturing space that need to be overcome by government intervention, AMP will focus on five initiatives:
- Manufacturing for national security
- Materials science
- Robotics
- Energy efficiency
- Developing partnerships and consortia between government, universities, and industry Continue reading
HPC can grow US manufacturing
HPCwire recently ran a great article describing in a nutshell the potential that high-performance computing (HPC) can have in increasing the competitiveness of US manufacturing.
Despite what media coverage about the ailing manufacturing sector may lead one to believe, the US still leads the world in manufacturing output. In 2009, as Michael Feldman of HPCwire describes, the US accounted for 20% of the world’s manufacturing output and was 45% more productive in this area than China. Nevertheless, there are challenges ahead; the US is only fourth in manufacturing competitiveness worldwide according to one study.
Why is manufacturing such an important part of the US economy even though it employs only 10% of the national workforce? Feldman writes:
The real value of the US manufacturing sector is that it’s at the heart of much of the science and engineering innovation on which the remainder of the economy rests. Today US manufacturers employ more than a third of the country’s engineers and account for 60 percent of all private sector R&D. As such, it creates products that are used by the more lucrative service industries. Think, for example, of all the myriad services that are dependent on the production of computer chips and other electronic devices. Manufacturing, like agriculture before it, is a foundational activity that acts as a catalyst to other business sectors.
As we’ve been following on this blog, this great potential for reinvigorating the foundational sector of the US economy has been taken up as a cause by various organizations ranging from the federal government to the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) to universities to system integrators like us. Continue reading
U.S. manufacturing and HPC: A bold plan to equip the “missing middle”
HPC in the Cloud ran an article last week written by Jon Riley of the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS). The article talked about the initiative by NCMS to rejuvenate manufacturing in the United States by connecting manufacturers with supercomputing hardware and software to make them more competitive in the global marketplace.
The leap from tried-and-true methods to newer technologies has historically been a difficult one, but it almost always pays off big in the long run. In the late 1990s, for instance, the Electric Boat Corporation (which has been the builder of submarines for the U.S. Navy ever since they were introduced a hundred years earlier) embarked on designing and building the USS Virginia, the first of a new class of attack submarines. This was the first time a U.S. submarine was going to be designed entirely on a computer before it was to be built.
There was no margin for error. A brand new class of submarine had to go from design to construction to launch in a matter of several years and perform excellently at sea to prove its worth as a weapons platform.
As it turns out, the USS Virginia was launched on schedule in 2003 and operated without a glitch during its first sea trials. Computer-aided design, which had accurately simulated every corner and lever of the submarine, proved an extremely effective way to design submersibles. The CAD software even alerted designers whenever a space was laid out in the blueprint that would prove too cramped for sailors to live and work.
HPC and the Missing Middle in the Silicon Prairie
HPC in the Cloud, a very insightful and well-written blog, published an article titled “HPC 360 Highlights Manufacturing’s Missing Middle“. There, author Nicole Hemsoth describes how a sector of the U.S. economy is losing competitiveness because companies are failing to take advantage of new computing technology.
This sector, called manufacturing’s “missing middle”, is comprised of the companies that furnish the large factories of the Midwest with the myriads of components and services that drive their production – the supply chain. Recent research has shown that, while China is taking full advantage of HPC technology to drive business, American industry has lagged behind, hurting its competitiveness in the global market.
There are several reasons why HPC solutions are not finding their way to the missing middle. First, most of the HPC providers in the US are located on the coasts, and their efforts are geared towards servicing clients there. Second, many companies in the missing middle are not knowledgeable about how HPC can help their business – supercomputing has long been exclusively for expensive government-funded laboratories, but that is not the case anymore. Finally, computing companies in the Midwest – the “Silicon Prairie” – have not stepped up to facilitate the missing middle’s transition into adopting supercomputing applications for business.
The moral of the story is that for many American industries to stay competitive (especially the missing middle of manufacturing), they have to incorporate HPC solutions when their business can benefit from them. It is both the responsibility of the HPC providers in the Silicon Prairie and the companies of the missing middle in the Midwest to work together in upgrading the computing technology that powers American manufacturing.