Bright Prospectives for Computer Scientists in High Performance Computing

July 22, 2011 - PRLog -- Supercomputers contribute significantly to the oil, automobile, aerospace, and chemical and pharmaceutical industries’ ability to solve complex problems.They enable companies within these industries to design new and better products in less time, and to simulate product tests that would have been impossible without spending months developing and experimenting with expensive product models. Some companies have attributed significant cost savings to the use of supercomputers. For example, although exact figures were not always available, representatives of some automobile and aerospace companies estimated that millions of dollars have been saved on specific models or vehicle parts because of reduced manufacturing or testing costs. In addition, one oil company representative estimated that over the last 10 years, supercomputer use has resulted in increased production of oil worth between $6 billion and $10 billion from two of the largest U.S.oil fields.

Analysts of Market Research Media project the global defense high performance computing market to increase from $2.6 billion in 2010 to $3.3 billion in 2015. The estimate for worldwide cumulative market 2010 – 2015 is $18 billion, for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.7% in the 6-year period.

Job market analysts from JobOutlook.info have graded supercomputing field as a highly promising career pathway for computer scientists.

The following industries will be top employers of computer science professionals with specialization in high performance computing:

Oil Industry – As an early user of supercomputers, the oil industry has realized substantial benefits from supercomputer applications. By using two key applications for processing seismic data3 and simulating reservoirs, oil companies have improved their ability to determine the location of reservoirs and to maximize recovery of oil and gas from those reservoirs. This ability has become increasingly important because of the low probability of discovering large oil fields in the continental U.S. New oil fields are often small and located in harsh environments, making exploration and production difficult. Several industry representatives estimated that the use of supercomputers reduces the number of dry wells drilled (at a cost of $5 million to over $50 million per well) by about 10 percent.

Aerospace & Defense Industry – Engineers and researchers in the aerospace & defense industry use super-computers to design, develop, and test aerospace vehicles and related components. Supercomputers, for example, have enabled engineers to analyze aircraft structural composition for design flaws and to simulate their performance in wind tunnels. This ability is important because wind tunnels are expensive to build and maintain, and cannot reliably detect certain airflow phenomena. Simulation permits a reduction in physical model testing, and substantial savings in time and money.

Automobile Industry – Automobile manufacturers increasingly rely on supercomputers to design vehicles that are safer, lighter, more economical, and better built. A primary supercomputer application-crash analysis is used to simulate how vehicle structures collapse on impact and how fast passengers move forward. These simulations provide more precise engineering information than was possible from physically crashing pre-prototype vehicles. They also reduce the number of vehicles required for these tests by about 20 to 30 percent.

Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries – from computer assisted molecular design to synthetic materials research, biotech companies increasingly rely on supercomputers to study critical design parameters and more quickly and accurately interpret and refine experimental
results.

Media partners:

http://www.computerscience.org
http://www.computerscientist.org
http://www.joboutlook.info

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Market Research Analyst is a panel of experts with extensive experience in custom and syndicated market research as well as strategic consulting across numerous technology-driven markets.

http://www.marketresearchanalyst.com