Cray T916 System Installed At Nissan Technical Center
4 November 1997
Cray T916 System Installed At Nissan Technical Center
System to be Used for Crash Testing, Safety Performance to Shorten Development
Time and Reduce Costs
EAGAN, Minn., Nov. 4 -- Cray Research, the supercomputing
subsidiary of Silicon Graphics, Inc. , today announced the
installation of a high-end CRAY T916(TM) vector supercomputer at the Nissan
Motor Co., Ltd. Technical Center, located in Atsugi and Isehara, Japan.
The system, with 16 processors and 4,096 MB of memory, is helping make
Nissan's new car models safer and better-performing. Targeted applications
include crash testing, safety performance analysis, engine flow analysis and
mechanical suspension testing. These simulations enable Nissan to reduce the
need for physical testing with prototype cars, thereby decreasing both the
time-to-market and cost of Nissan's new car development.
Nissan formally accepted the system on Sept. 30. Nissan made the decision
to acquire the CRAY T916 supercomputer based on its growing need for
processing power and computational accuracy to accommodate the increasing
volume of crash model data -- which has grown from 15,000 elements six years
ago to 100,000 elements today -- as well as new crash safety regulation
requirements. The powerful CRAY T916 system also enables Nissan to leverage
concurrent engineering to achieve its overriding goal of shortening time-to-
market.
"Cray and Cray(R) systems have played a significant role in improving
quality, reducing costs and shortening development time in Nissan's car
development process since 1986, when we introduced the CRAY X-MP(TM) system to
our user base and became the first Cray user in the Japanese auto industry,"
said Joji Masuda, general manager, engineering systems department, Business
Process Innovation Division, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. "We place a high value on
Cray's long-term leadership in the worldwide high-performance computing (HPC)
marketplace and its close relationship with a wide variety of software and
engineering companies. We selected the CRAY T916 system because of Cray's
overall reputation, as well as the system's ability to perform well on our
suite of critical applications."
The CRAY T916 system supports more than 3,000 registered users and
approximately 300 users per month, most of whom are product development
engineers. For Nissan, a key benefit of using the CRAY T916 system and its
arsenal of other Cray supercomputers is that the systems facilitate concurrent
engineering, which shortens time-to-market by enabling design and
manufacturing engineers to work together on design and manufacturability of a
new car model, rather than engineering in serial fashion where design is
followed by manufacturing engineering. Using the CRAY T916 system and other
Cray systems, Nissan's design and manufacturing engineers can work from the
same data sets to simultaneously conduct various simulations, such as crash
testing, engine flow analysis and metal stamping. Nissan's goal is to
significantly shorten the development period from 30 months to 19 months using
Cray technology and by implementing concurrent engineering.
The CRAY T916 supercomputer is one of three models available in the CRAY
T90(TM) product line. Providing nearly 60 billion calculations per second
(gigaflops) of peak performance on a range of third-party and proprietary
technical computing applications, the CRAY T90 product line is the most
powerful line of general-purpose computers available in the world. Employing
an array of innovative technologies, CRAY T90 systems include pioneering
connectors that eliminate all internal wiring, leading to faster processing
speeds and improved uptime. These systems primarily serve mission-critical
work for hundreds of users who need answers from a central resource.
Cray Research is a subsidiary of Silicon Graphics, Inc. and provides the
leading supercomputing tools and services to help solve customers' most
challenging problems.
Cray is a registered trademark, and CRAY T916, CRAY T90 and CRAY X-MP are
trademarks, of Cray Research, Inc. Silicon Graphics is a registered trademark
of Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Press materials are available on the World Wide Web via
http://www.cray.com.
SOURCE Cray Research, Inc.