PHYSICS

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign today (TUESDAY, April 27, 2004) will present the 2004 Grand Challenge Award to Chicago-based Boeing. The award recognizes the innovative work Boeing has done as a partner in NCSA's Private Sector Program (PSP), which gives partner companies access to the center's leading-edge technology and expertise. The award will be presented during the PSP annual awards luncheon beginning at noon at the Holiday Inn, 1001 Killarney, Urbana. "Our relationship with Boeing demonstrates how the public and private sectors can work together and benefit one another," said NCSA interim director Rob Pennington. "By working with NCSA, companies get the opportunity to use cutting-edge technology, and in working with our corporate partners, the researchers at NCSA gain insights about how our tools apply to real-world issues." Boeing's advanced research and development unit, Phantom Works, teamed with NCSA in 2003. Over the course of a year, Phantom Works and NCSA created a "distributed task manager" that demonstrated the potential benefits of network-centric planning and management in assuring quality and improving performance during the production of commercial airplanes. "Working with the innovative researchers at NCSA brought a fresh perspective and invaluable expertise to bear on this critical issue," said Gary Fitzmire, Boeing Phantom Works vice president of engineering and information technology. "As rich in intellectual capital as Boeing is, we can't rely exclusively on our own resources to find the best ideas and innovative solutions. We are striving to reach out globally to find the best talent and technologies–-and the people at NCSA are among the best in the world in developing information and high-performance computing and communications technology." Teamed with NCSA, Boeing has been working to improve the processes used to ensure the quality of its highly integrated products. A Boeing 767 jetliner, for example, has more than 3 million parts, which are manufactured by more than 800 suppliers throughout the world. Before a 767 leaves the Boeing final assembly plant in Everett, Wash., inspectors make more than 20,000 quality checks on the plane's various subsystems. Each test must be recorded and tracked, which currently involves inspectors filling in forms and checking completed work on computers stationed around the assembly plant. There can be a significant amount of time between when an inspection task is completed and when it is recorded. In an effort to streamline this process, Boeing and NCSA developed a specialized database solution that can track inspections and automatically parcel out new jobs. This distributed task manager, which was tested on the 767 final assembly line, is built on SAMCat, the Secure Active Metadata Catalog, created by NCSA researchers. The distributed task manager has demonstrated the potential to move Boeing closer to its vision of building a wireless factory. That vision includes quality inspectors who would walk the floor with a tablet-sized computer or personal digital assistant connected via a wireless network to a central database. The wireless device would constantly receive updates on what inspection tasks could be performed. The inspectors, meanwhile, would continually update their progress using the wireless device. The system would then determine which tasks could be performed as a result of that progress. New tasks could then be delivered to inspectors in real-time according to their skills, certifications, or roles in the assembly plant. Issues, instead of being trapped in an inspector's notebook until the next time he makes a report, would become common knowledge and could be addressed more rapidly. NCSA established the Grand Challenge Award in 1992 to recognize PSP companies for significant strategic and competitive breakthroughs resulting from their partnerships with NCSA. The goal of NCSA's Private Sector Program is to partner with leading-edge companies so that NCSA software and technologies are applied to real-world business challenges. Working with NCSA, companies have reaped the benefits of access to technological breakthroughs before their competition. In addition to Boeing, current PSP partners are AllState, Caterpillar Inc., Motorola Inc., and Sears, Roebuck and Co.