Europort-D: parallel computing for European industry

Klaus Stüben German National Research Center for Information Technology stueben@gmd.de Numerical simulation is becoming increasingly important for many branches of industry, mainly because of its potential to reduce the need for costly experiments and to shorten development cycles while providing extra insights. However, the realization of these benefits has often proved to be slow. First, achieving satisfactory accuracy has required substantial computing resources, and conventional HPC systems have been very expensive. Also, when much more cost-effective systems became available, in the form of parallel systems, the software to exploit this technology was unavailable. This situation has now been largely rectified, partly because of the highly successful European Esprit initiative Europort. The initiative migrated 38 industrial codes to parallel platforms in a portable way, covering almost the whole spectrum of industrial applications for which HPC is essential. Such applications include fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, crash simulation, forging, cartoon animation, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, radiotherapy, and electromagnetics. Where costly high-computing power was the main bottleneck for numerical simulation, the availability of parallel software now allows a substantial step forward. Parallel technology is ready to help engineers obtain insights through more accurate analyses in less time or even perform simulations that were impossible before.