 | Boeing's R&D division replaced expensive mainframe computing resources with Beowulf clusters using HP C360 workstations running MSC.Linux for compute intensive simulations to design aircraft more cost effectively.
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Boeing's R&D division is replacing expensive mainframe computing resources with Linux and HP-compute clusters to run compute-intensive simulations for designing aircraft more cost-effectively. | |
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Need to Reduce Computing Costs
Michael Mills managed
computing resources for Boeing's Phantom Works division, the
centralized R&D group for the giant aerospace company that does
contract work for the U.S. government and NASA. He was responsible for
overseeing the division's $30 million computing budget. "Boeing is
becoming increasingly focused on rate management-the dollar per hour
value that you charge outside customers when you do a contract,"
explains Mills. "If you want to keep your rate stable or reduce it, you
could either bring in more work with the same people or you could
reduce heads. No one wants to do the latter so we tend to focus on
reducing indirect costs. The largest controllable indirect expense is
computing. There is a tremendous focus on that. We are constantly asked
to reduce our computing budget."
A few years ago, the R&D
group was examining its high-speed compute serving costs. They were
using Cray supercomputers and IBM mainframes for complex computational
jobs to support their aircraft design work. For example, to do a
computation of fluid dynamics of a wing variation, engineers need to
measure the structural performance at 60 million points on a wing. It
can take a couple weeks to run this type of computation. "When you're
paying for processing time, it gets very expensive. Running a Cray can
be faster but it costs a lot of money. We thought there had to be a
better way," explains Mills.
Beowulf Clusters from MSC.Software
Mills
had heard good things about Linux and Beowulf clusters. Beowulf is an
approach to building a supercomputer as a cluster of off-the-shelf
personal computers, interconnected with a technology like Ethernet, and
running programs written for parallel processing. "It seemed like a
good way to solve our problem," he says. "Instead of buying cycles or
big processors that are outdated in a year, we could pick up a Beowulf
cluster of high-speed workstations for a fraction of the cost. We could
easily scale the cluster in the future to provide more processing
power, or break it up and reallocate the resources in other ways if it
didn't work out."
So Boeing R&D formed a project to evaluate
PC clusters running Linux. They decided to buy a turnkey Beowulf
cluster from MSC.Software, the software company that also provides the
key engineering software Boeing uses for Computational Fluid Dynamics
processing. MSC.Software and HP work in close partnership to offer turnkey solutions to their customers.
MSC
had developed their own version of the Linux operating system -
MSC.Linux - that is optimized for compute-intensive applications like
Computational Fluid Dynamics processing and specific applications like
Nastran. Boeing's initial cluster included ten HP C3600 workstations running MSC.Linux. HP
provided the hardware, MSC configured the cluster and then they both
delivered a turnkey system to Boeing. "The hardware people from HP
and application people from MSC worked together very closely. They had
us up and running in two hours," says Mills. "We've never had any
downtime."
Superior Customer Support Reduces Computing Costs
Boeing has been very happy with both price-performance and customer support from HP. "The HP
systems provide great price-performance. If I can get better
performance, I need fewer machines. This also helps us reduce computing
costs," says Mills.
Customer support is a critical
differentiator for companies that want to keep their internal support
headcount at a minimum. "We're very happy with the customer support
we've received from both HP and
MSC," says Mills. "From a financial standpoint, the more we get in
hardware and software support from a vendor, the less we have to
provide within Boeing. In a big company like Boeing, rates for
resources are high. By the time you calculate the cost of a support
person, it's expensive. That's why you see so much outsourcing, the
more you get in customer service, the lower our computing costs are."
Performance Up by 600 Percent at Half the Cost
The combined Linux HP
compute performance cluster clearly enabled the R&D group to meet
their financial and computing resource objectives. "The results of the
Linux clusters running on HP
systems have been tremendous. We've had a 600 percent increase in
performance and reduced our costs by 50 percent. All our users are
asking: 'Why were you so conservative? You should have done this a long
time ago.'" -- Michael Mills, Computing Resources Manager, Boeing.
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