Computer systems and algorithms are evolving to
a point where commodity computers/workstations are
able to perform analyses that supercomputers were
performing just a few years ago. For example, in an
automotive-industry example, Sobeski et al. (2000) used
MSC/NASTRAN for NVH analysis and sensitivity computations,
and the crashworthiness analysis was performed
by the RADIOSS CRASH code. By using 254
processors to solve the optimization problem, the solution
as obtained in 1 day comparedwith an estimated 257 days
if only a single processor was used.