Keeping up with the Joneses in IT is undoubtedly an expensive undertaking. Fortunately, massive investments in upgrades may soon be a thing of the past for Singapore-based engineering and manufacturing firms, thanks to the efforts of the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC).

Formed through a merger between the Centre for Computational Mechanics and the National Supercomputing Research Centre, the IHPC is one of the 13 research institutes supported by the National Science and Technology Board.

The institute has been playing fairy godmother to local firms for two years now by helping them increase their competitiveness by developing and using high performance computing-based (HPC) simulation and visualisation.

A year ago, when studying the needs of the small- and medium-sized engineering and manufacturing companies, the researchers at the IHPC’s Computing Services and Research (CSR) division found two very striking similarities.

(Picture on left: The original 2000 Supercomputer is one of the main servers for the E-engineering portal)

The first was the lack of access to affordable HPC resources for doing research and development (R & D) work. Companies that wanted to stay competitive had to use the most up-to-date software, but most of them found these constant upgrades very costly.

Many engineering and manufacturing firms also did not have enough experience or know-how to combine their area of expertise with relevant HPC solutions.

After analysing its own operations through staff conferences, and discussions with both existing and potential clients, the institute realised that its outreach had been limited because its services were provided mainly at its physical premises.

Fortunately, the solution to the problem was surprisingly simple ? putting its engineering applications and consultancy services on the Internet through the aptly-named E-engineering portal.

Dr Terence Hung, CSR’s then manager said: “Although portals such as this have been used to aid in engineering research work at universities in the US, this is the first time a portal is being used to serve the needs of small- and medium-sized commercial firms.”

Very simply, the portal gives users access to a range of advanced engineering applications and services through the Internet. These applications and services are from the IHPC itself, as well as vendors and consultancy firms that wish to use this portal to reach more customers.

Added Hung, who is now with the Sun-Netscape Alliance: “Users will no longer have to be concerned about costly upgrades for software or hardware, as everything will be provided by the people managing the portal. All the users need is a Web browser to access the software and hardware found through the portal.”

Although the idea of using portals is fast gaining popularity as a tool for knowledge acquisition (such as with Ask Jeeves.com and others), the E-engineering portal takes the capability one step further by using the concept for “harder”, more specialised industries such as engineering and manufacturing.

So far, a number of local and regional application vendors have welcomed this initiative by agreeing to provide software for the portal. These comments from CAD-IT, a local engineering consultancy firm, are typical.

Said Mr William Moy, vice-president of business development: “The portal is a good way for us to tap into the resources of the IHPC and reach a wider clientele for our services. Together with the services that IHPC itself offers, the portal is like a one-stop centre for users who need to access the latest engineering applications at a lower cost.”

According to Hung, the enthusiasm that local firms have shown toward the portal is not surprising, as many hardware and software vendors, especially in the US, are already pushing this technology as another avenue for promoting their products. One example is Sun Microsystems’ move to provide StarPortal and its latest Ray-1 thin-client which offers word-processing and spreadsheet applications, as well as presentation software (see For Further Reading).

WIDE RANGE OF COMPUTER PLATFORMS
The services that the IHPC provides are facilitated in part by the institute’s wide range of computer platforms. One example is the Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 which has the capability of producing a mind-boggling 34 billion calculations per second, making it one of the most powerful machines in Asia.

Complementing the IHPC’s bountiful hardware resources is an impressive representative suite of applications for a number of disciplines, such as computational fluid dynamics, structural analysis, chemistry, electronics design, electromagnetic compliance/interference, micro-electromechanical systems and data analysis.

Said Hung: “Our well-balanced suite of software also provides the applications that are commonly used in the different branches of engineering and manu-facturing. This is quite an extensive list as there are literally hundreds of software packages that are available for both these industries, even in a relatively small sector of engineering such as computer-aided design.”

Go to Page 2