Supercomputing Comes to the Rust Belt

New initiatives are starting to bring the transformative benefits of supercomputer power to small and midsize businesses

by Steve Hamm

Three years ago, when Michael Garvey began looking for ways to revive his family's 85-year-old manufacturing business in down-on-its-luck Youngstown, Ohio, he settled on a surprising solution: supercomputing. For much of a century, the tiny company—originally Trumbull Bronze Co. but renamed M-Seven Technologies—specialized in casting bronze parts for steel mills. But now, it has started making money by collecting and analyzing vast storehouses of data to help larger manufacturers improve their operations.

A job that M-Seven did for BMW late last year shows how a company like Garvey's can be reborn thanks to the highest of high technology. BMW planned to retool its 900,000-square-foot paint shop in North Carolina, and it hired M-Seven to scan the entire space using sophisticated laser scanning equipment.

Once the scan was done, BMW used 600 gigabytes of data M-Seven gathered as the basis for supercomputer simulations that would help it come up with just the right process for switching over to the new equipment. So far, scanning represents less than 10% of M-Seven's revenues, but it's growing. "We're doing a phase change of our business," says Garvey, the company's president and a grandson of its founder.

Innovation Driver

M-Seven's transformation from metal melter to number cruncher is emblematic of a movement that's starting to gather steam all across the country's weary industrial zones. Old-line manufacturing companies are discovering that high-performance computing can give them a competitive edge or whole new sources of revenue.

Economic-development experts hail this trend as a key to reviving the Rust Belt and improving national competitiveness. "The potential here is absolutely outstanding," says Suzy Tichenor, vice-president of the Council on Competitiveness, an industry advocacy group. "The country that wants to outcompete has to outcompute. So high-performance computing is an important part of the country's innovation capacity."

Demand from large manufacturers has helped make supercomputers one of the most robust markets within the tech industry. Hardware sales worldwide grew by 9.4% last year, to $10 billion, according to tech market researcher IDC. When you include software, storage, and other related pieces, the market could be as large as $40 billion, according to another market researcher, Tabor Research.

Heavy Investment

Because of the increased use in the past few years of off-the-shelf computers linked in clusters, there has been more than a tenfold improvement in the price-to-performance ratio for this type of computing. That makes it more affordable for commercial uses, such as oil exploration, automobile crash-test simulations, and fluid dynamics testing.

But for supercomputing to penetrate to thousands of small manufacturing companies, the technology has to be even less expensive and more widely available. The Council on Competitiveness says most small companies that could use supercomputing capabilities now limp along by doing their number crunching on desktop workstations or small clusters of computers totaling 64 microprocessors or less. "Making the initial investment in hardware or software is the hardest part, and, until you do it, you don't know if you'll really see a major benefit from it," says analyst Addison Snell of Tabor Research.

That's why states, universities, and private companies are busy dreaming up new ways of making supercomputing available to smaller manufacturers. M-Seven Technologies is participating in a program started in 2006 called Blue Collar Computing, which is run by the Ohio Supercomputer Center. The OSC, made up of a handful of Ohio universities that own supercomputers, provides expertise and time on its computers for the states' manufacturers.