OSC Celebrates, Supports Ohio Manufacturing

Executive Director, OARnet
,
OH-TECH
Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - 12:15pm (updated Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - 2:08pm)

Ed.—This post is the first in a series on manufacturing in recognition of Ohio Manufacturing Month (October) and National Manufacturing Day (Oct. 4). For others in this series, follow the manufacturing tag.


The Ohio Supercomputer Center is pleased to be celebrating Ohio Manufacturing Month and National Manufacturing Day in a very special way. 

Earlier this summer, the Ohio Third Frontier Commission awarded a $3 million Innovation Platform Program grant to OSC and our partners for a project to design and deploy easy-to-use advanced manufacturing simulation apps. Our partners – Procter & Gamble, Intel, Nimbis Services, TotalSim USA, AltaSim Technologies and Kinetic Vision – are funding the balance of the three-year, $6.4 million project.

Our goal: provide Ohio’s small- and medium-sized manufacturers with the tools they need to leverage simulation-driven design.

Many large manufacturers already have embraced simulation-driven design. The benefits are tangible; simulation-driven design replaces physical product prototyping with faster and less expensive computer simulations, reducing the time to take products to market, while improving quality and cutting costs. Unfortunately, many smaller manufacturers are missing out on this competitive advantage, because they cannot afford to invest in hardware, software or staff training. With our program, all that changes.

We decided to name our effort “AweSim.” Awe, because a sense of awe is one of the elements that often accompanies the “Aha! moment,” a specific point in time when a student, professor, researcher, inventor or engineer unlocks the key to a challenging question or situation. Sim, short for simulation, is the means by which OSC helps clients achieve those inspirational moments of awe.

For more than 25 years, we’ve been providing our users with the tools they need to accelerate the discovery of their “awe” moments. A member of the Ohio Technology Consortium, OSC has been at the forefront of the national effort to help industry gain easy and affordable access to advanced modeling and simulation technologies throughout its history. AweSim builds on this experience, bringing together experts in HPC, modeling and simulation, workforce training and e-commerce to provide businesses with access to simulation-driven design that lowers costs and increases speed-to-market. 

This effort is but one way the Center is continuing to grow and evolve to meet the ever-changing needs of our academic researchers and industrial partners. We continually strive to provide the most appropriate supercomputing architecture for our researchers. We forge collaborations, such as the Ohio State University Driving Simulation Laboratory. The partnership between Ohio State, Honda R&D Americas and OSC celebrates its one-year anniversary later this month. Our staff members serve in various leadership roles with Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which serves as the foundation for a national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. We've created and deployed OSC OnDemand, an innovative web-based toolkit for researchers – academic and industry alike – that removes barriers to accessing high performance computing systems. 

And, we think the addition of AweSim to our portfolio is pretty awesome!