Of the approximately 300,000 manufacturers in the United States, over 95% are characterized as small and medium sized (SMMs). While millions of Americans are employed by much larger manufacturers such as Boeing or General Electric, SMMs provide more than twice as many jobs. National economic recovery and development is dependent on the revitalization of U.S. manufacturing, and the most efficient way to spur rapid growth is to intensely leverage what already exists.
In the future, 90 per cent of all products will be developed virtually. High Performance Computing power will be required. We believe that Digital Manufacturing is one of America’s greatest – and most underutilized – competitive assets.
Let us state the value of high performance computing in another way.
HPC TELLS you what you’d otherwise have to GUESS – and does it so fast, and with such accuracy, that quaint ideas like prototyping and over designing will soon be as obsolete as the slide rule. If adopted throughout the entire U.S. manufacturing base our competitiveness in the world will be enhanced.
For a long time HPC was limited by investment expenses and required infrastructure. Today, though, you can quite literally have a supercomputer under your desk. The Air Force uses Playstation 3 game consoles for top secret design research, code breaking, encryption. Why use videogame hardware for national security? Because the $300 PS3 can perform one hundred billion operations per second. Network 2,200 of them, like the Air Force did, and you can begin to see the kind of computing power that’s available off the shelf. Today’s computers don’t “crunch numbers.” They devour data. And when you link them together you have access to processing power that was once only available to governments and universities.
The new tool for manufacturing innovation exists in the digital domain, examining, simulating, and processing trillions of data points, then returning valid prognostic results in a matter of hours, not years. Forget prototyping, forget material testing. With predictive simulation, every material, design, eventuality and variable is analyzed, cross-analyzed, and assessed for potential outcomes. Someday soon, any attempt to innovate, or manufacture, without this tool will be the equivalent of an office that doggedly sticks to manual typewriters when all other companies have high-end PCs, email, and word processing applications. The most successful innovators are the ones who innovate at high speed, bringing new products to manufacturing and then on to market in months rather than years.
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Visit the NCMS Digital Manufacturing Strategic Interest Group (SIG) Home Page |
Revitalizing Manufacturing Whitepaper (PDF)
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