“Secret weapon” of business

Thanks to Sun’s HPC Watercooler for the pointer to this article in Forbes that lionizes the adoption of HPC by American business as a cornerstone of competitive advantage. The article is based on some of the work of the Council on Competitiveness, and is written by their communications honcho. So, unbiased it ain’t.

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.

Not much in there of technical interest for us, but the Ping, Goodyear, and Whirlpool case studies are mentioned, and it’s always fund to read about how HPC makes it into your golf bag. And it’s good to see HPC in the mainstream media.