Industry 4.0 Drives Smart Manufacturing

From the intelligent edge to HPC-enabled modeling and simulation workloads, technology is fueling new approaches and enhanced business outcomes across the manufacturing sector.

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

Industry 4.0 brings digital and physical technologies together to create responsive, interconnected operations. Enabled by the convergence of operational and IT systems on shared, highly industrial, optimized compute platforms, businesses can analyze data across the supply chain and adjust operational systems in near-real time to reduce costs, cut waste, predict problems, and innovate offerings.

Smart manufacturing integrates data and information from multiple applications, processes, and products that can be composed to form new solutions. It enables predictive and adaptive manufacturing and supply chain processes that allow businesses to fulfill requests for customized products more effectively and to respond more quickly to fluctuations in markets through demand forecasting.

Process manufacturing involves combining ingredients and raw materials using a recipe or formula. This approach is frequently employed in industries that produce goods in bulk, such as food and beverages, oil refining, pharmaceuticals, and plastics. Discrete manufacturing is focused on the final assembly of market-ready units such as automobiles and appliances.

With smart factory technologies like predictive maintenance, both process manufacturing and discrete manufacturing can become more efficient from reduced downtime and improved production.

Sustainable manufacturing is a holistic approach to production that involves the application of Industry 4.0 and digital manufacturing technologies to minimize pollution, conserve energy and natural resources, protect the safety of workers, and equitably reward all those involved in production. It requires capturing and analyzing data throughout the entire supply chain and manufacturing process as well as energy and waste management.

The intelligent edge is the fusion of intelligent and scalable compute performance and AI for industrial operational workloads. It enables solutions such as factory digital twins and manufacturing execution systems (MESs). This fusion is enabled by workload convergence and optimization of software infrastructures for edge compute platforms.

Intelligent edge platforms offer a host of benefits, including cost reduction, improved security, heightened productivity, and improved real-time performance. The intelligent edge allows manufacturers to run multiple workloads in standard equipment—eliminating the need to move large volumes of data from on-premises to the cloud. It also enables comprehensive quality management through near-real-time product defect detection, process and supply chain optimization, and an increase in asset utilization. Entirely new business models can also be enabled simply by adding new workloads.

Manufacturers use distributed HPC systems to run highly complex workloads such as crash simulations or fluid dynamic modeling. Because HPC systems are immensely powerful, they’re able to perform the required calculations quickly and within acceptable time parameters. Using a high performance computing architecture for these kinds of HPC analytics, HPC AI, and HPC simulations needs, manufacturers are able to optimize results, adjust designs and systems, and increase efficiency.

HPC systems provide the computational horsepower required by advanced CAE workloads and tasks. Your experts and engineers can leverage the performance and flexibility of HPC systems to increase the scope and depth of their efforts, conduct more-accurate analysis, and expedite time to value for their projects.