Date: Dec 30, 2011 Source: bizjournals (
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Laid off from a shrinking Team Rahal, racing engineer Ray Leto started a U.S. sister company to a British engineering firm that specializes in automotive fluid dynamics and was deciding whether North Carolina or car racing mecca Indianapolis was a better fit than Central Ohio.
But the proximity of auto manufacturers, support from TechColumbus and, perhaps most important, the ability to tap into the state-run Ohio Supercomputer Center for complex simulations landed TotalSim LLC at the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center in 2009.
"To have a resource like OSC ... it was kind of the key part of putting the company together," Leto said.
Although TotalSim has its own high-powered computing in-house, access to extra capacity for peak jobs is key to its growth plan. The six-person company has a goal of hitting $1 million in revenue in 2012. TotalSim gains a competitive edge by keeping costs down, Leto said. It saves on license fees by using open-source software, he said, and using the state computer for occasional huge jobs avoids a big outlay for equipment that mostly would sit idle.
"It's almost a well-kept secret," Leto said. "Large corporations understand this. ... It's the smaller, medium-sized engineering companies and design firms that don't know they can have access to this high-performance modeling and simulation environment."
Business recruiting tool
The center is working harder to get that secret out, said Ashok Krishnamurthy, interim co-executive director and senior research director. As well as expanded marketing efforts, the center now can set aside even more computing power for private industry. It took delivery Dec. 28 of $4 million in servers and processors, replacing half the supercomputer's brain while providing 1.5 times the computing capacity with 40 percent less power consumption.
"The costs have gone down to adopt this technology, but it's still expensive enough that small and medium businesses have issues in being able to access it," Krishnamurthy said.
In many cases, he said, the Supercomputer Center has the software to run a job, eliminating that expense for clients, and its staff is available for advice.
Ohio is among few states that not only has built and still pays for a public supercomputer, but makes it available to private industry basically at cost for computing and staff time. New York and New Mexico are among states that provide business access to machines at public universities, and the federal government supports the most powerful centers.
The state budget enacted in July specifically adds economic development to the center's mission, and Krishnamurthy said he's working with the Ohio Department of Development to better use the resource as a recruiting tool.
"This is the unique kind of asset that is very specialized for certain kinds of companies," said Lisa Delp, executive director of the Ohio Third Frontier Commission. "It's not something that we can raise a flag for everyone."
Development officials will promote the simulation and modeling capabilities when appropriate for niches in engineering and manufacturing, but they don't want to overpromise to a wide swath of companies that wouldn't benefit.
"How they market this asset really rests with the center itself," she said.
Faster, smarter, smaller
The supercomputer, housed not at the center's Kinnear Road offices but a block away at the State of Ohio Computing Center, consists of a mass data storage cluster, the Blueprint for an Advanced Learning Environment cluster for mainly academic use, and the two-part John Glenn cluster where most of the academic, state and private jobs get done. That array of IBM racks was installed in two phases, including a $4 million upgrade in 2009.
State capital funds paid for most of the latest $4 million replacement -- named for gunslinger Annie Oakley -- of the 5-year-old half of the system, this time using Hewlett-Packard machines. About $500,000 came from a federal grant created in March to create the National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium, which buys time on public supercomputers and trains small and midsize manufacturers to use high-powered computing to design products and manufacturing processes. A large automotive manufacturer can improve its products by simulating changes that balance crash protection against a smooth ride, for example, while Ohio State University's Center for Automotive Research can run simulations of electric car battery performance in one hour instead of 72 hours on desktop computers.
The new system has room for more clients who will get results faster, Krishnamurthy said. Marketing will be targeted to the small- and medium-business sectors.
One way to get the word out is working through trade groups that sponsor online applications that tap into the supercomputer to solve specific engineering problems. The Edison Welding Institute runs a portal in which members can simulate types of welds. PolymerOhio has one that helps with the design of injection molds and factory layout. The new system will allow more of those portals, Krishnamurthy said.
It can be tough to convince small companies they can afford the resource, said Wayne Earley, CEO of PolymerOhio in Westerville.
"Using these tools, they can have a much higher likelihood of having a high-quality part quickly," he said, "without having to go through a group of trials and having adjustments to their mold."
