HPCwire: High Performance (Potato) Chips

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Industry >> Retail

May 05, 2006

High Performance (Potato) Chips

by Michael Feldman, Editor, HPCwire

Page: 1 of 4
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 All »

"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."

Page: 1 of 4
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Florida State Gives Virtual SMPs a Spin

The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...

HPC Powers Bobsled Team to Olympic Gold

For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

CFD: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Mar 08 | Sporting Life | Formula One engineers differ on benefits of CFD. Read more...

AMD Tries to Draw Intel Into Chip Battle

Mar 08 | InfoWorld | AMD offers up 48-core server prize. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html