Avoiding The Missing Middle With AI

It is common knowledge in the manufacturing sector of the economy that many of the companies that should have deployed HPC simulation and modeling applications one or two decades ago to help with product design, among other tasks, did not do so. With the lowering of costs of HPC clusters based on X86 processors and the advent of open source software to perform many tasks, this seemed counterintuitive. And very annoying to those who were trying to address "the missing middle," as it came to be called. There are a lot of theories about what went wrong here, but at the very least, even with the lowering of the cost of HPC wares, buying a cluster, managing it, and keeping it busy to therefore justify the substantial investment was tough to rationalize, no matter the potential returns. Then there was the difficulty of sorting out how to make an HPC workflow, consisting of multiple applications hooked together, work well when existing systems – designing with scientific workstations and easier to use CAD/CAM tools – did the job.