Supercomputing for Manufacturing SMBs

Using a browser to do the work of thousands of computer processors

Parallel Works Inc. is commercializing technology developed at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago to provide “supercomputing-as-a-service” to small and midsized businesses, helping them to manage the expanding volume of information that is constantly redefining businesses and industries.

“High Performance Computing, or HPC, refers to the use of many computers working concurrently (‘in parallel’) to solve large-scale computing problems, such as simulating the operations of a manufacturing plant,” explained Michael Wilde, CEO of Parallel Works Inc. “If, for example, you have 10,000 computers available, and can thus evaluate 10,000 designs at a time, then a computation that would have taken 1 million minutes (almost two years) can now be done in under two hours. That's high performance computing.”

Parallel Works is offering that capability in a Cloud-based, HPC platform via a "software as a service" model, typically to be accessed from a Web browser. “Users select from a set of pre-written ‘workflow apps’ developed by third-party vendors, or even by the customer's own IT staff, to solve specific problems product design, manufacturing process improvement, assembly or end-customer application simulation,” Wilde detailed.

Read: Scaling High-Performance Computing to Manufacturers’ Needs