Case Study: Ford Motor Company achieves efficient, scalable HPC with Altair PBS Professional

Ford Motor Company Building an Efficient HPC Infrastructure

Ford Motor Company’s Numerically Intensive Computing Department (NIC) in Dearborn runs large-scale CAE simulations (NASTRAN, LS‑DYNA) across a heterogeneous mix of clusters and SMP systems. The challenge was to “decomplexify” this environment—making many different machines and solver versions appear as simple, usable tools to engineers—so Ford engaged Altair and its PBS Professional workload-management product.

Altair implemented PBS Professional (and provides ongoing consulting) to unify scheduling, enable workstation cycle harvesting, and support a custom scheduling layer using available source code. The solution let Ford scale to very high processor counts, maximize use of available processor time, plug in new hardware transparently for better ROI, and hide much of the infrastructure complexity from engineers.

Ford Motor Company

Robert Walsh

Account Manager