Consumer Goods Technology

reliability and ease of use of Abaqus in P&G’s environment.

Since then, P&G’s IT staff plans to move the operating system into departmental pilot programs sometime this year.

“We believe that
Windows Compute
Cluster Server will make
HPC accessible to more
people... which will help
us design and test
products faster and
reduce costs.”

— KEVIN WILSON, HPC ARCHITECT, PROCTER & GAMBLE

Accessible Benefits

By moving to clusters running the new solution, P&G can broaden HPC use, increase user productivity, and speed cluster deployment and management.

Wilson says, “We believe that Windows Compute Cluster Server will make HPC accessible to more people, including engineers, scien-

tists, financial analysts and others, which will help us design and test products faster and reduce costs.”

Wilson sees end-user productivity as the biggest benefit of Windows-based HPC.

“We hope to link clustering to the Microsoft tools that users use every day: Office Communicator 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet software.”

For example, researchers can drag a job from Excel into the cluster, process it, get an instant message that the job is done and have the data end up on a SharePoint site. Wilson anticipates productivity savings because of the shorter learning curve — and bigger time savings when clustering is integrated with desktop productivity tools.

The time savings extends to IT users as well as P&G deployed a fully functional, Windows-based cluster in just a few hours versus two weeks or more previously.

“We expect to reduce the time spent on cluster integration and management by up to 20 percent,” concludes Wilson.

Extreme Product Design

DEUCE SNOWBOARDS GIVES THE SPORT A NEW EDGE

The invention of the snowboard threw the downhill snow sports world onto a whole new ride. But the snowboard hasn’t had a significant advance since metal edges some 20 years ago. Founded in 2005, Deuce Snowboards