Jan 2006
Report Nine: Grid Computing – Adoption in the Manufacturing Sector

The manufacturing sector – typically defined as encompassing the automotive, aerospace and general manufacturing areas – has been one of the early adopters of grid computing. The manufacturing firms themselves have a clear need for greater computational power, but they want to balance a desire to reduce costs with a need to accelerate production. The major companies have often grown through acquisition and are now scattered across various cities, countries and continents. Improving communication and interaction between divisions is a major challenge, particularly given that facilities are often located away from major metro areas, and therefore away from the main communications hubs.

The nature of grid deployments varies widely, from the server grid approach to dedicated servers and, more typically, cluster-based approaches. But all of these rely on the ability to parallelize tasks and the major enhancements in speed and complexity that are offered by grids. A few manufacturers have already made great strides in grid adoption, moving quickly from small clusters, usually based around homogenous servers, to hundreds or thousands of devices. But for the majority of industrial manufacturing firms, the jury is still out on grid technology and they have yet to identify a compelling reason to move beyond using grids for the heavy lifting of compute-intensive simulations.

This ninth report in the 451 Grid Adoption Research Service provides an overview of manufacturers' use of grids, as well as their main obstacles to wider deployments. It profiles 14 early adopters across the automotive, aerospace and general manufacturing segments and analyzes their deployments, experiences and future plans. It also analyzes the approaches and strategies of 10 of the main grid vendors and ISVs targeting the manufacturing sector.

> Early-adopter case studies: Airbus, Arcelor, Audi, Avio, Caterpillar, Corus, DaimlerChrysler, Delphi, Ford and MTU.

> Vendor assessments: Abaqus, Altair, Engineous, Fluent, IBM, Magna Steyr, Platform Computing, RTDA, Sun Microsystems and United Devices.

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