Nick Barrett, Editor
nick@maintenanceandengineering.com
@MaintOnLine
Just as the potential of Industry 4.0 to deliver on the promise of Smart Factories looks like it could soon be more widely realised – see the article from IBM in this issue’s Asset Management Journal section – a range of new ideas and technologies, and improvements to existing technologies, are emerging. Many of them are coalescing around High Performance Computing (HPC).
Some manufacturers are reportedly making great progress in integrating new technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and analytics, AI and machine learning with their production operations, bringing changes that will revolutionise the way that companies manufacture, improve, and distribute their products. Others are struggling to make Industry 4.0 investments and to physically retrofit these technologies onto their existing facilities and operations.
As our Maintenance & Asset Management Journal article from IBM spells out, 5G is hoped to offer help that will allow more of manufacturing industry to take advantage of new technologies, and the heavy lifting is being undertaken under the 5G Factory of the Future Programme based primarily at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre.
Collection of large amounts of data of value to improving productivity and allowing maintenance operations to be more effective has been undertaken by manufacturing and related industries for years. One of the most notable things about this data is how little of it is actually used. HPC using supercomputers and parallel processing techniques are now beginning to be linked with technologies like edge computing and Artificial Intelligence to meet the demand for high performing processor power.
Data analytics needs the means to process this information quickly, an issue that is being addressed by the authors of the IBM article and their colleagues involved in the 5G Factory of the Future programme. But the processing power of faster computers is needed to make the most effective use of the data. Which is where HPC comes in.
HPC has been with us for a long time and supercomputers and quantum computing are part of the lingua franca of the technology literate. But computer performance levels are advancing at a higher speed than seen before and the ability of computers to perform calculations extra speedily is now being measured in exaFLOPS, rather than just FLOPS. Exascale computing refers to a computer’s ability to perform a billion calculations a second. Exascale computers are expected to be available widely in 2022 or 2023.
This isn’t a conceptually new type of computing, like quantum computing was, but it refers to a massive increase in processing power with existing technology. Anyone who was already feeling left behind by all these advances could be excused for thinking things are getting worse, as this super computing ability will come at a prohibitively high price. Not necessarily so. Alongside this is the growth of suppliers providing HPC as a service (HPCaaS) rather than trying to sell expensive kit.
What is being called democratisation of access to this new technology is fostered by being able to access HPC through HPCaaS without having to buy leading edge hardware and software and trying to fit it onto existing manufacturing facilities. HPC is already being used across industry, including automotive, aerospace, process industries and food manufacturing, and we can expect it to become ever more prevalent, but now possibly also in companies that have shied away from it because of the high upfront costs.
More funding for quantum research
While industry busies itself with trying to digest what is already, or shortly about to be, available, scientists are hard at work on the next great technological leaps forward. Quantum computing has strong prospects of providing some of them and is an area where the UK has a strong foothold.
Ion beam technology specialist Ionoptika Ltd and the University of Surrey have just been awarded project grants worth a total of Åí425,000.00 from Innovate UK to expand their research into new manufacturing technologies for quantum devices. The funding comes on the back of some Åí1Bn in UK government funding allocated for quantum technologies research.
Quantum technologies look set to drive the next generation of innovation and technologies. This project alone, entitled “Rapid and Scalable Single Colour-Centre Implantation for Single Photon Sources”, is hoped to lead to a unique product that it is said could revolutionise quantum computing.
Few companies have successfully built a quantum computer because of the extreme challenges in manufacturing and operating them. The Innovate grant is to support work to open up new scalable manufacturing methods to researchers in the UK and around the world, another step towards democratising access to new technologies that is mentioned above.