The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) strategy to help revitalize American small and mid-sized manufacturers through high performance computerized digital manufacturing moved forward this week as the NCMS joined the leadership of a new consortium dedicated to those goals.
The National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium (NDEMC) announced their formation last week in a White House press conference. NDEMCs focus is to use high-performance computing (HPC) technology to energize the U.S. manufacturing sector. The consortium includes NCMS, the Council on Competitiveness, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Ohio Supercomputing Center (OSC), and Purdue University, as well as industrial partners John Deere (Deere and Company), General Electric, Procter & Gamble and Lockheed Martin.
The consortium, as co applicants, were funded with a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce and an additional $2.5 million investment from industrial partners. The NDEMC will be tasked to spread adoption of advanced modeling and simulation capability using HPC, throughout the supply chains of some of the country's leading manufacturing OEMs. While large manufacturing companies successfully use these tools to improve their products, smaller companies lack the resources and technical knowledge to do so. NDEMC will attempt to fill that gap by relying on consortium members to reach this missing middle of late adopters before it is too late.
NCMS will use its track record of successful manufacturing R&D development to help ensure that the NDEMC service offerings are of immediate practical use to small manufacturers.
