High-
Performance
Productivity
P&G EMBRACES HPC TO
REDUCE COSTS AND SPEED
TIME TO MARKET
In recent years, The Procter &
Gamble Company (P&G, www.pg.
com) has emphasized shifting real-world work to virtualized work
combined with better electronic
collaboration to increase throughput and lower costs.
P&G has been involved with
high-performance computing
(HPC) since the early 1980s,
but in early 2000 the company
embraced HPC as a critical link
in its work to test chemical interactions, perform molecular modeling and run package design
simulations with more than 500
clustered servers.
To expand HPC use from approximately 50 specialty researchers to
thousands of product designers and
test engineers, P&G’s IT organiza-
P&G uses high-performance computing as a critical link in its work to test chemical
interactions, perform molecular modeling and run package design simulations.
tion needed to make the computer
clusters easier to use.
“We’ve grown HPC dramatically — from a single cluster with
128 cores to multiple clusters with
3,000 cores,” says Kevin Wilson,
HPC architect for P&G. “However,
our clusters still aren’t approachable. Users have to spend eight
hours or more learning how to submit HPC jobs, which is a barrier to
broader cluster use.”
Also, deploying and managing
existing clusters required a great deal
of time for the IT staff. “There are
so many moving parts in traditional
clusters, including the operating system, drivers, job scheduler and
authentication mechanism,” Wilson
says. “We’ve been spending considerable amounts of time integrating
software from different vendors.”
Window of Opportunity
In mid-2007, Microsoft Corporation
( www.microsoft.com) introduced
P&G’s IT staff to Windows Compute
Cluster Server 2003, which is built
on the Windows Server platform
and is designed to support high-performance technical and scientific applications that take
advantage of parallel processing
for improved performance.
P&G deployed an eight-node
cluster running Windows Compute
Cluster Server 2003 and evaluated
its ability to run three key applications; the Abaqus and LS DYNA
finite element analysis tools from
Dassault Systèmes ( www.3ds.com)
and Livermore Software ( www.lstc.
com) respectively, and the Fluent
flow modeling tool from ANSYS
( www.ansys.com).
“We really liked the deployment
and management features of
Windows Compute Cluster Server
2003,” Wilson says. “It amazed me
that you could push a few buttons
and have the whole cluster built in
a few hours.”
An HPC team from Dassault
Systèmes worked closely with
Microsoft and P&G to configure
Abaqus, which is designed to run on
Windows Compute Cluster Server,
on the cluster. In addition, Dassault
Systèmes engineers ran simulation
models to evaluate the performance,
