Dissatisfaction with the current state of supercomputing applications has lead Chrysler Corp, the Ford Motor Co and General Motors Corp to form the Supercomputer Automotive Applications Partnership, SCAAP (CI No 2,229). The companies say that the use of parallel supercomputers will help shorten development times, but unfortunately there is a lack of engineer-friendly software. Currently it can take months to develop a mathematical description of a vehicle and weeks to process said Wayne Hamann, SCAAP committee member and director of product and manufacturing systems at Ford. While he acknowledges that this is still faster that building prototype, he says that the consortium aims to accelerate the process to the point where a virtual software description of a vehicle is used to impact the design early in development. Initial research will focus on four areas – fluid dynamics, including fuel flow and aerodynamics; structural mechanics; computer grid-generation technology and visualisation of computer simulations. Unlike more conventional ratings of computational speed, which concentrate on processing power the consortium’s measure includes problem formulation, data entry and display. Such is the commercial power of the industry that other parallel-supercomputer users should find themselves benefiting from the project, which is initially expected to run for five years. The kind of problems that SCAAP is addressing have wide applicability outside of the car business: in particular the group will look at code design and software portability and has expressed a preference for its supercomputers to be built from off-the-shelf components and standard chip designs, rather than custom hardware. Related to code design and portability, the group says it hopes to develop its own high performance parallel computer programming language together with a library of subroutines specifically aimed at speeding up the description of complex surfaces. SCAAP is merely the latest of twelve research projects that the Big Three have run under the auspice of USCAR – the US Council for Automotive Research (motto: ‘Sharing technology for a stronger America’). Funding is expected to come from both private and public sectors – it is expected that at least some of the US national laboratories will be involved in the research. Total funding has yet to be set.