SGI and ESI Power BMW for Faster Designs and Greater Safety

30 October 2000
SGI and ESI Power BMW for Faster Designs and Greater Safety
  SGI Origin 3000 Series Achieves More Than 12 GFLOPS Sustained Performance
                              With ESI PAM-CRASH

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 30 SGI and
ESI today announced that they have succeeded in achieving unprecedented
computing power using the latest generation SGI(TM)supercomputer, SGI(TM)
Origin(TM) 3000 series, and ESI PAM-CRASH 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(R) 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(TM) Origin(TM) 2000 servers* running in parallel with PAM-CRASH
software from ESI.  Additionally, a farm of 40 SGI(TM) Origin(TM) 200 servers
was dedicated to stochastic 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(TM) 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."