What’s New: World-renowned golf equipment leader PING teams with Intel, Altair and Dell Technologies to boost product line innovation by applying high performance computing (HPC) to its design strategy. This collaboration has helped PING slash design cycle time, decrease variability in product performance and improve quality without delaying time to market.
“With the help of the Altair Unlimited appliance built on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, PING has been able to streamline its entire product development pipeline. We can now run different types of simulations and multiple analysis programs at the same time. The time saved frees our designers, developers and engineers to innovate.”
Why It Matters: PING credits its continued success to over 60 years of dedication to innovation through science and technology. Its Turbulator Technology, inspired by design features on airplanes and semitrucks, helps golf pros and amateurs swing faster and hit the ball farther, while its Dragonfly technology, based on the science of biomimicry, helps distribute weight in other areas of the driver, allowing the heads to increase forgiveness and help compensate when players hit the ball off-center. Both technologies run on Intel. By collaborating with Intel, Altair and Dell Technologies, PING can now run these programs concurrently and still have resources to test, innovate and explore new ideas to meet the needs of its customers.
How It Works: Having worked with Intel® technology for 15 years, PING leverages Intel® Xeon® Gold processors with Altair Unlimited, a fully managed, turnkey HPC appliance based on a Dell EMC PowerEdge server platform. These processors offer high clock speeds and large memory capacity to deliver excellent performance for PING’s computational fluid dynamics, impact, material analysis and acoustic analysis workloads. In all, simulation results are 4.5 times faster for a single job. The appliance also includes a head node, powered by Intel® Xeon® Silver processors, that orchestrates resources, controls storage and runs visualization tools to deliver power and performance.
A wireframe overlay highlights PING’s variable face technology on an iron. (Credit: PING Golf)
A PING engineer examines stress data for a virtual durability test. (Credit: PING Golf)
An aerodynamic pressure plot of a PING driver prototype is visualized in a virtual wind tunnel. (Credit: PING Golf)
Data analyzes 3D tracking tests at the PING Proving Grounds. (Credit: PING Golf)
Gerry Lester “Bubba” Watson Jr. is an American professional golfer. (Credit: PING Golf)
Intel technologies deliver tremendous value to the Altair applications and solutions that PING uses by providing consistent performance and strong integration through unique instruction sets like Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) and tools such as Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library (oneMKL) and Intel® MPI Library that are distributed as part of the Intel® oneAPI toolkits. Together, these technologies help PING deliver on its business goals and tackle challenges associated with remote work by reducing design risk and fostering creativity, while also improving efficiency and quality.
“Solutions from Intel, Altair and Dell help us confidently build out and deploy systems that will not only achieve great performance but will also perform well for years to come,” Morales said. “When you see a product that says ‛Intel Inside’ you know a lot of hard work and advanced technologies have gone into making it. We want our customers to feel the same way about us.”
What’s Next: Morales said PING’s leaders are optimistic that as tools evolve, so too will the innovation of their products. As they learn how to ask more intelligent questions, machine learning will help them optimize their designs even faster and further increase the speed of innovation.
More Context: AI Developer Tools and Resources | How PING Golf Stays Ahead of the Innovation Curve with Altair HPC Appliance Powered by the Latest Intel Xeon Processor (ISC' 2020 Session Video) | Ping Drives Golf Innovation with Altair HyperWorks Unlimited and Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Case Study) | PING Golf and Intel Collaborate on HPC and AI to Find the Perfect Golf Club (Video)