Competitive Advantage through Supercomputing

Corporations and Supercomputing

To stay competitive in a global economy, corporations must continually improve products and processes, and do so quickly. High-powered research that can quickly transform new ideas to products in the marketplace is part of the answer. In today's world that means access to state-of-the-art scientific computing -- Supercomputing.

Through its Corporate Affiliates Program, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) brings the benefits of supercomputing technology to American industry. The same computing power, user support, and system management approach that attracts award winning science projects is applied to helping businesses address their most challenging information processing problems.

Benefits of Supercomputing

Businesses of all sizes are able to use high performance computing to reduce costs and work more quickly. But don't take our word for it. Hear what some of our Corporate Affiliates Program participants have accomplished.

Reduced Costs

Using supercomputing along with physical modeling to develop process control models of molten steel flow, USX reduced the cost of steelmaking.

"We have the confidence to supply our customers with quality steel grades on the basis of the model,"

says Achilles Vassilikos, research consultant at US Steel Technical Center.

"This is a cost savings because we save on handling, we save on testing the chemistry, and we reduce the inventory."

Faster Project Completion

The Aluminum Company of America, Alcoa, greatly reduced their job turnaround-time.

"Those 50 hour jobs that used to take a week run in less than one hour,"

says Bob Dick, senior engineer at Alcoa.

"The models we're running require alot of computer time. For us, the CRAY is the way to go."

Alcoa also notes that developing a new aluminum can design with modeling on the CRAY costs about $2,000, compared to $1000,000 in the laboratory.

Improved Information Quality

At Pfizer Inc., researchers found that supercomputing gives not just faster, but also better, results.

"More realistic models give higher quality information,"

says Beryl Dominy, director of Pfizer's computational research group.

"One of the most useful aspects of using a supercomputer in drug discovery is the relevance of the models it allows us to generate."

Custom Designed Programs

The Corporate Affiliates Program combines training, consultation, and access to systems in order to meet the needs of each participant. Since each organization's needs are unique, we employ custom designed programs to support our partners.

For more information on PSC's Corporate Affiliates Program, please contact PSC's Corporate Affiliates Office.