Mountain View, CA — Silicon Graphics, Inc. said that its computers are helping Ford Motor Company produce safer cars. Ford is using the company’s Cray T90 supercomputers to achieve a record level of sustained performance on production jobs — more than one gigaflop (one billion floating point calculations per second) — when running RADIOSS, an advanced automobile crash analysis application.

Ford, which recently ordered a third Cray T90 system because of the impressive performance, also uses a 64-processor Silicon Graphics Origin2000 supercomputer in the crash work.

Bringing the highest level of computing power to vehicle crash simulations is important because it helps manufacturers reduce design cycle times and deliver better, safer cars faster. Ford has received five-star safety ratings from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration(NHTSA) for its most popular automobiles and minivans. Ford and other major automobile manufacturers rely on Silicon Graphics hardware for their high-performance computing(HPC) needs.

For certain important classes of applications, such as crashworthiness and NVH (noise, vibration and harshness), there is no substitute for vector supercomputer systems, such as the Cray T90. The company’s new, scalable vector supercomputer systems are expected to reach performance levels of multiple tens of teraflops (trillions of floating point calculations per second). The first member of the Silicon Graphics scalable vector product line, the Cray SV1, was announced in June 1998.