New initiatives are starting to bring the transformative benefits of supercomputer power to small and midsize businessesThree years ago, when Michael Garvey began looking for ways to revive his family's 85-year-old manufacturing business in down-on-its-luck Youngstown, Ohio, he settled on a surprising solution: supercomputing. For much of a century, the tiny company—originally Trumbull Bronze Co. but renamed M-Seven Technologies—specialized in casting bronze parts for steel mills. But now, it has started making money by collecting and analyzing vast storehouses of data to help larger manufacturers improve their operations.
A job that M-Seven did for BMW late last year shows how a company like Garvey's can be reborn thanks to the highest of high technology. BMW planned on retooling its 900,000-square-foot paint shop in North Carolina, and it hired M-Seven to scan the entire space using sophisticated laser scanning equipment.
Once the scan was done, BMW used 600 gigabytes of data M-Seven gathered as the basis for supercomputer simulations that would help it come up with just the right process for switching over to the new equipment. So far, scanning represents less than 10% of M-Seven's revenues, but it's growing. "We're doing a phase change of our business," says Garvey, the company's president and a grandson of its founder.
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