A lot of major businesses especially required to resolve the types of number-based issues at which supercomputers perform extremely well. The machines are very good at building models of special types of behavior.

P&G, producers of Pringles potato chips, has been using supercomputers to model the aerodynamic qualities of the chip’s shape. Neither making chips slowly nor them quickly is cost effective, due to their special shape, A lot of them would fly right off the assembly line. The supercomputer saves the company ample time and money that would otherwise spend on trial and error settings. Certainly, the company has been getting a lot of advantages from supercomputers from 1996, since it bought its first power machine i.e. an IBM SP10.

It not only about the potato chips various other assembly lines owned by the company has experienced supercomputer-created advancements. By creating complex models on these machines and making virtual modifications, the company saved a lot of money. For instance, computer models allowed P&G to carefully shift its Folgers coffee containers from metal to plastic, without crushing the lighter material.

Manufacturing these models is not all that simple. There are various factors to be considered; a few are hard to model, like liquids and certain chemicals. Other factors include how molecules response to each other and to their packaging and environmental factors like heat or cold. This may consume a lot of computing energy, but it can be far less costly to check how these work in the virtual world before introducing it to the actual world. Recently, even supercomputers could not keep the record of all the variables, but Moore’s Law has helped. “The problems have always been there,” said Lang. “But now we’re able to solve problems with modeling and simulation we had no hope of solving five years ago.”