The winning Boeing team with leaders from NCSA and the Private Sector Program. Left to right: Mark Nolan, NCSA; Rob Pennington, NCSA's interim director; Gary Fitzmire, Boeing; Earl Ley, Boeing; Scott Lintelman, Boeing; Danny Powell, NCSA's executive director; and John Stevenson, NCSA.

 

Meeting a grand challenge

With safety and quality as their goals, Boeing's research and development unit, called "Phantom Works," teamed up with NCSA in 2003. Phantom Works employs 4,000 people dedicated to creating breakthroughs in performance, quality, and cost for the company. Together, over the course of a single year, Boeing and NCSA built a demonstration of a "distributed task manager" that highlights the benefits of network-centric planning and management in airplane inspection. Such software will help Boeing further ensure that their inspectors do the right job at the right place at the right time.

"Short development times are important because our whole business is predicated on time to market," according to Gary Fitzmire, vice president of engineering and information technology for Boeing Phantom Works.

In honor of this vital and rapid effort, NCSA's Private Sector Program presented its 2004 Industrial Grand Challenge Award to Boeing in April. The annual Grand Challenge Award honors breakthrough research completed by private sector partners while working with NCSA.

"NCSA provides a focal point for computer science, computational science, and information technologies. By working with the Private Sector Program partners, we're able to connect real world problems with the necessary infrastructure," says Rob Pennington, NCSA's interim director.

Bob Krieger, president of Boeing Phantom Works, concurs: "The real reason we partnered with NCSA is because they're very experienced in various software systems… Once you partner with somebody that's really expert, you have a lot of confidence and you can get the end objective, which is to have a good product."

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