Applications

Most experience on parallel machines has been with academic and research problems. However, the field can only realize its full potential and be commercially successful if it is accepted in the real world of industry and government applications. Some of these are seen in the grand challenges, which are the focus of the federal high-performance computing and communications initiative.

However, more generally, parallel computing offers U.S. industry the opportunity of a global competitive advantage. This is a technology where the U.S. has a clear lead over Europe and Japan, and this technology leadership can be turned into a potent ``weapon'' in the global economic ``war'' we expect in the 1990s.

We have surveyed some of these industrial applications of parallel computers as part of a new project, ACTION, funded at Syracuse University by New York State.

Interesting possibilities include:

• use in the oil industry for both seismic analysis of new oil fields, and the reservoir simulation of existing fields;

• environmental modeling of past and potential pollution in air and ground;

• fluid flow simulations of aircraft, and general vehicles, engines, air-conditioners, and other turbomachinery; integration of structural analysis with the computational fluid dynamics of airflow; car crash simulation;

• design of new drugs for the pharmaceutical industry by modeling new compounds;

• simulation of electromagnetic and network properties of electronic systems---from new components to full printed circuit boards;

• identification of new materials with interesting properties, such as superconductivity;

• simulation of electrical and gas distribution systems to optimize production and response to failures;

• production of animated films and educational and entertainment uses, such as simulation of virtual worlds in theme parts and other virtual reality applications;

• support of geographic information systems, including real-time analysis of data from satellite sensors in NASA's ``Mission to Planet Earth''; and

• a relatively unexplored area, known as ``command and control'' in the military area and ``decision support'' or ``Information Processing'' in the civilian applications. These combine large databases with extensive computation. In the military, the database could be sensor information, and the processing a multi-track Kalman filter. Commercially, the database could be the nation's medicaid records, and the processing would aim at cost containment by identifying anomalies and inconsistencies. My survey of New York State industry would suggest that this combination of databases, and significant computation is the largest opportunity for parallel computing.