Cray Inc. today announced that leading golf equipment designer and manufacturer PING Inc. has made a Cray XD1 supercomputer a critical part of its research and development program. Running Livermore Software Technology's LS-DYNA computer-aided engineering (CAE) software on the Cray XD1 system, PING has reduced the time needed to conduct preliminary structural tests of new club designs from weeks to mere hours. The Cray XD1 system employs a high-performance computing (HPC) architecture that allows designers to run larger, more detailed simulations with greater accuracy than was possible with a conventional engineering workstation. By simulating golf club characteristics on the Cray supercomputer using finite element analysis (FEA) techniques, PING engineers can eliminate weak or ineffective designs before they move on to more expensive and time-consuming physical prototyping, which involves molding an actual club and testing it using a robotic golfer to precisely hit the balls. It generally takes the company about three to four weeks to produce a physical prototype. PING tests new club designs on the supercomputer by creating a three-dimensional matrix that closely approximates how the equipment would perform in real life. The system can simulate the impact of a club head against a ball, the bending of the shaft during a stroke, the stability of a putter while in motion and other complex problems. With these capabilities, the PING design team can, for example, identify areas of low stress and virtually reposition weight to other areas of the club, increasing performance while maintaining the original balance and feel. "PING is committed to ensuring that the innovations we design into our golf clubs result in solid improvements that make the game more enjoyable for our customers," said Eric Morales, staff engineer and FEA design analyst at PING. "With the Cray XD1 system, we can now run simulations in minutes that previously took several hours or even days on a generic workstation. The LS-OPT design optimization and probabilistic analysis package that we use to compute the best design features within specified parameters demands a complex simulation environment that can run jobs across multiple processors simultaneously. That level of computing would have been impossible on our previous system." "The business advantages that PING will gain through virtual equipment prototyping showcases the power and versatility of the Cray XD1 system's purpose-built, high-performance design," said Himanshu Misra, CAE business manager at Cray. "PING demonstrates that the benefits of HPC are no longer confined to scientific and large-scale engineering organizations. Enterprises of many kinds are increasingly taking advantage of supercomputing to bring better products to market, increase productivity and sharpen their competitive edge in the marketplace."