Jaguar to Use Advanced Computers for Styling and Engineering

08/16/96

Newsbytes reported that Jaguar Cars will turn to Silicon Graphics and Cray to supply the computer power needed for Jaguar's vehicle styling and engineering analysis. The company will buy 84 Indigo2 Extreme workstations, six Challenge S desktop servers, and a Power Challenge XL server from Silicon Graphics. Cray will supply a J916 server.

Jaguar will use Silicon Graphics technology for design work in all component areas. Jaguar officials said the Indigo2 Extreme workstations will be used for styling and finite element analysis, running Computervision's CADDS 5 computer-aided design system and ICEM Surf styling software for surface modeling.

Roger Staines, Jaguar's technical services manager, said that the company chose Silicon Graphics/Cray technology on the basis of price/performance ratios. The company has already used Silicon Graphics Indigo2 XZ workstations for styling Jaguar's new XK8 sports car.

The Power Challenge XL and Cray J916 servers will help assess design alternatives by mathematically evaluating the performance of design structures before designers build clay models.

Andrew Cresci, Silicon Graphics' UK marketing manager, said that computer visualization can create significant competitive advantage in the manufacturing industry. "By building digital, rather than physical, prototypes, manufacturers can spend more time creating and refining the product, while reducing overall time-to-market and production costs," he said.

Jaguar's new Indigo2 Extreme workstations house 250 megahertz (MHz) R4400 RISC (reduced instruction set computing) microprocessors from MIPS Technologies, with subsystems which can reportedly render 630,000 three-dimensional (3-D) shaded polygons per second.

The workstations feature a 64-bit system bus architecture with two built-in Fast SCSI-II (small computer systems interface type II) channels, each delivering up to 10 megabytes-per-second throughput. Each workstation has 120 megabytes of memory and a two gigabyte hard disk.

Paul Dever -- The Auto Channel