General Motors has upgraded its ability to design vehicles and
carry out crash testing and component vibration analysis through
the installation of 23 pSeries 690 Unix-based servers from
IBM.
Ten of the 32-processor servers have been installed in GM's Detroit
headquarters and are configured as an IBM eSeries supercomputer.
With processing power of 2.3 trillion floating-point operations per
second, it is believed to be the most powerful supercomputer in use
in the auto industry.
The other 13 servers were installed in GM facilities in Russelsheim
in Germany, and Trollhattan in Sweden.
The new servers will supplement GM's existing computing systems and
will increase the car manufacturer's computing abilities
dramatically, said Peter Ungaro, IBM's vice-president of
supercomputing.
IBM is using the supercomputer across its whole design process from
analysing designs to learning from crash testing and metals stress
tests, Ungaro said. The machines were installed and benchmarked
during the past year and could lead to additional purchases, he
said.
GM would not release the value of the deal. But the list price of
each 32-processor p690s lists for approximately $2.1m (£1.4m)
IBM said the 23 servers would quadruple GM's existing computing
power. Each unit is equipped with 32 Power 4 1.3-GHz processors and
64GB of memory.