NEWS BRIEFS
Mountain View, CALIF. — SGI and ESI Group announced that they have succeeded in achieving unprecedented computing power using the latest generation SGI supercomputer, SGI Origin 3000 series, and ESI PAM-CRASH 2000 to assist BMW in creating a crash simulation engine. BMW was also able to significantly shorten the design-cycle time using SGI Origin 3000 Series rather than conventional design analysis technology. The result for future BMW Series 5 owners is even safer automobiles delivered in a shorter period of time.
The SGI and ESI team was able to achieve an unprecedented sustained performance of more than 12 GFLOPS using the SGI Origin 3000 series with 96 processors and 400 MHz MIPS processors. This marks the highest level of performance ever achieved in a crash simulation.
The crash simulation engine originally installed at BMW consisted of 12 SGI Origin 2000 servers running in parallel with PAM-CRASH software from ESI. Additionally, a farm of 40 SGI Origin 200 servers was dedicated to st ochastic simulation projects aimed at improving the robustness of the new designs. BMW recently conducted a performance investigation of the MPP version of PAM-CRASH2000D with the simulation of a vehicle frontal crash traveling at 35 mph. The vehicle model contained 120,000 elements with 117,500 contact segments split into 11 contact interfaces. The simulation was conducted for 70 ms of real time, which required about 58,000 time cycles. Origin 2000 was able to achieve sustained performance of 3.2 GFLOPS with 32 R12000 300 MHz MIPS processors and 5.4 GFLOPS with 64 processors.
“The key to our success for superior solutions in engineering is always having the best compute resources. The SGI Origin 3000series servers, coupled with the MPP version of PAM-CRASH from ESI, enable extremely fast simulations at very reasonable costs,” said Touraj Gholami, head of the crash simulation department at BMW. “BMW’s engineering teams are extremely excited about the possibilities the SGI Origin 3000 series offers.”
SGI provides a broad range of high-performance computing and advanced graphics solutions that enable customers to understand and conquer their toughest computing problems. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices worldwide, the company is located on the Web at http://www.sgi.com . A pioneer and major actor in numerical simulation, ESI Group provides v irtual prototyping and manufacturing software. ESI Group solutions allow the e valuation of product performances in order to make paramount decisions relating to transportation safety, manufacturing and the impact of these products on the environment. ESI Group’s goal is to help industrial companies shorten their time to market, enhance the quality of their products and cut costs by taking into account material physical properties rather than simply basic geometric and kinematic features. Visit http://www.esi.fr for additional information.
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