HPCwire: High Performance (Potato) Chips

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May 05, 2006

High Performance (Potato) Chips

by Michael Feldman, Editor, HPCwire

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"I'm going to be talking about things that are very familiar to people," said Tom Lange, Director of Modeling and Simulation at Procter & Gamble (P&G).

Not the kind of introduction you normally think of when someone speaks about high performance computing applications. But this is exactly what Tom Lange talked about at the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Conference in Newport, Rhode Island a few weeks ago. His presentation was titled "The Aerodynamics of Pringles."

Tom Lange has spent over 27 years at Procter & Gamble, modeling products, processes and production systems -- everything from how the aerodynamics of potato chips optimizes production to how baby size affects diaper leakage. Although P&G has really only used high performance computing for the last 10 years or so, its origins go back to the late 70s.

"When I joined Procter & Gamble in 1978, we had high-end IBM 360/370 kinds of computers that we used to solve statistics problems," said Lange. "Our first finite element analysis kind of problem -- something that would look more familiar to a supercomputing person today -- we solved using a Boeing computer in the middle of the 1980s. So our exploration of the use of simulations to improve our ability to innovate for the consumer is a legacy that is not just a few years old, but in fact more like 15 years old."

Today, P&G has a fairly typical setup for commercial users of high performance computing. Lange said they have a heterogeneous computing environment -- a shared memory SGI Altix system and a multi-hundred-node cluster. Choosing which system to use depends on their suitability for the specific type of modeling/simulation application.

As far as software goes, P&G gets its codes from a variety of sources. They use software packages from ISVs like Abacus, Fluent and LS-Dyna. Most of P&G's proprietary code is implemented with user-defined functions within these packages. Lange calls this his "commercial-plus" strategy. At P&G, they have not attempted to maintain internal codes.

P&G also uses some national laboratory codes from both LANL and Sandia National Labs. "The same weapons code used at Los Alamos for more sophisticated purposes is used for combustion code in automotive applications and at P&G for paper products manufacturing," said Lange.

Procter & Gamble tells its story

Unlike its competitors, P&G's been publicizing how it uses high performance computing technology for a few years now. Other companies have been much more reticent to share their HPC story with the masses. Even Lange admits this story would not have told at P&G in the 1980s. But the nature of product manufacturing has changed.

"We're in a global competition for ideas," said Lange. "There's no illusion at Procter and Gamble that it's the only place where smart things happen. Since that illusion is not there, our willingness to say what we do know gives us the hope we'll learn from others. If we're just sitting in the back hiding, not saying anything, that doesn't improve our innovation."

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