Computerworld article on HPC in industry

Computerworld has an article about the use of HPC by smaller companies trying to gain competitive advantage. The article was spurred by the activity in the Senate last week on the America COMPETES Act culminating in Bill Gates’ testimony.

Two companies are covered: Simpson Strong-Tie Co., a company that makes metal connectors used in construction, and Ping, maker of golf clubs. Strong-Tie has cut its new product develop time from six to three months using a small Opteron system from Linux Networx.

According to the article:

Another manufacturing firm that has turned to higher-performance systems is Phoenix-based Ping Inc. It makes golf clubs and found that using a Cray XD1 system — it was installed in 2005 — substantially reduced development time. Jobs that use to take a day are now done in minutes.

“HPC is working great for us; we can get our answers faster and we can increase the resolution of the simulations to get more accurate results at the same time,” said Eric Morales, a staff engineer at Ping. “The computer and software that we purchased has already paid for itself.”