Matthew Faraci 05.22.09, 3:53 PM ET
June 2, 2009 Even in good times, companies work hard to save money and increase efficiency. In these times, take that hard work and upgrade it to obsession. The ailing economy is weeding out businesses with Darwinian cruelty. If you are creative, clever and determined, you can survive. If not, you either close the doors or, worse, become the property of the U.S. taxpayer.
A new study by the Council on Competitiveness, a group that spends its time figuring out how to give the U.S. an edge in the
global marketplace, has unearthed something that is just what the doctor ordered.
It's a technology that helped Ping craft Angel Cabrera's Augusta-winning golf clubs and also enabled Goodyear and Whirlpool to cut costs in one stroke. It is high performance computing--or HPC--and it allows for high-end modeling and simulation, making extremely sophisticated and complex virtual design and prototyping possible. The U.S. is the world leader in this technology, and with it American companies have discovered new ways to innovate that were previously unimaginable.
It uses the fastest, most cutting-edge supercomputers in the world, which have traditionally been tucked away in national
laboratories and other government research facilities. Think of the top-secret Pentagon machines made famous in so many Tom Clancy thrillers. Well, those were your grandfather's supercomputers.
Today, savvy businesses are doing modeling and simulation with HPC and finding that they can avoid investing significant capital in creating prototype products to test (the old "build and bust" way of designing new products), and run highly advanced simulations instead. This lets them develop products in significantly less time, get to market much faster, trim their research budgets and design cycles and create the most efficient production processes possible.
Diving into HPC does, as you might imagine, require a considerable upfront investment, but it's a proven fact that this investment pays off. Here are three examples from recent Council on Competitiveness studies:
Ping, the manufacturer of high-end golf equipment, has employed modeling and simulation to craft some of the most desired
clubs in the sport, including the G10 that Angel Cabrera just used to clinch the title at the 2009 Masters tournament.
The company designed its fine-tuned clubs using software developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose
high-resolution 3-D simulations let engineers visualize the movements of the exterior and interior of the club as it collides with the ball. They could see how the components shifted during the stroke and what happened if different materials were used, making adjustments down to the thousandth of an inch. The United States Golf Association initially rejected the G10 for use in competition because it performed too well. The engineers actually went back to their virtual prototype and redesigned the club to have a lower level of performance.
Ping found that its initial investment in advanced computing paid for itself in one year. Time to market is critical, as the company gets 85 percent of its income from new products. What used to take 10 hours on a workstation now takes 20 minutes with HPC; the design cycle went from 18 to 24 months to just eight or nine. Today, Ping stands at the top of a fiercely competitive marketplace, because of supercomputing. It has the No. 1 iron in dollar sales, and the No. 2 driver in units and dollar sales.
In 2003 and 2004 the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company was in a definite slump, losing out to competitors, its revenues
declining. So the company changed the way it developed tires, turning to modeling and simulation. Goodyear engineers gave up
designing, building and testing physical prototypes and began using HPC to test virtual models instead. They reduced their
product design time from three years to less than one, and their expenditures on tire building and testing went from 40% to just
15% of the research budget.
View Forbes.com - Magazine Article |
