When Seagate was founded in 1979, it was the first company to build 5.25" hard disc drives specifically for the PC. And while it may have seemed like a minor milestone at the time, in reality the introduction of Seagate's hard disc drives helped fuel the PC revolution, and the world has never been the same. Suddenly, it was possible to quickly and easily store and access data like never before, giving people access to unprecedented amounts of information and eventually giving rise to developments like the Internet. The entire computing landscape changed dramatically and evolved to a point today where computing and digital information have become part of our everyday lives. For 23 years Seagate has been developing the technology and manufacturing the products that helped make it all happen.

Today, Seagate is the world's largest manufacturer of hard disk drives. They design and manufacture hard drive for PCs, high-end servers, notebook computers, and consumer appliances such as Microsoft's Xbox, among other applications. The facility using the Aspen Beowulf cluster is the design center for ATA-based drives, which are most often used for personal computing and consumer appliance applications.

A hard drive is a complicated device that requires the integration of both cutting-edge mechanical and electrical technology. The head-media mechanical group at Seagate is responsible for ensuring the functionality and integrity of the head-disk interface. Simply put, a hard drive consists of a rotating disk that stores information magnetically. To access the information, a transducer must read the information on the disk. This transducer is usually connected to a block of material known as a slider, which "flies" over the disk at spacing of less than one-millionth of an inch. The job of the head-media group is to ensure that this spacing stays within prescribed bounds for each and every disk drive that is manufactured. One aspect of this task involves doing simulations of the fluid dynamics that occur between the slider and the disk, since these dynamics dictate (to a large extent) the spacing that will result.

The Aspen Systems cluster at Seagate is instrumental for performing such simulations. This cluster is currently comprised of 28 nodes, each of which has 2 Athlon processors, between 1 GB and 2 GB of RAM, and a Seagate hard drive. With this cluster, Seagate can perform up to 24,000 simulations per day. Such a large number of numerical runs is essential for uncovering rare but potentially detrimental effects that can occur due to processing variations among the drive components.