GM to slash more time from product development with investment in new supercomputer.
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GM to slash more time from product development with investment in new supercomputer.
from The Car Connection
GM says its new computer is super
General Motors will turn to IBM for the most powerful supercomputer ever used in the auto industry, a system which will "let us take months out of our development cycle," said Bob Kruse, GM's director of vehicle integration for North America, and "let us get the right product to the right niche of the market faster."
The new supercomputer, developed specifically for GM, is an IBM p655. It is, in a sense, a network of high-speed computers, made up of about 2000 separate IBM POWER4 and POWER5 processors and 145 individual servers. That means it can, in effect, serve a large number of clients and functions simultaneously. But when all those pieces are tied together, the new p655 will be more than twice as fast as the system it replaces, and "puts us on the scale of (computing power) being attained in the national laboratories," according to Bill Pulleybank, IBM director, Deep Computing Institute.
Government facilities, like Sandia and Los Alamos, use their incredible computing power to design nuclear weapons or predict weather patterns. GM will use its new digital system to push forward with its High-Performance Computing Initiative, which has already yielded a 40 percent improvement in engineering productivity. Before the switch to computer-aided design and engineering, it would typically take as much as five years to develop a new vehicle. The all-new Kappa platform, along with the new Pontiac Solstice roadster, required just 27 months. And some GM programs are down to 15 months, and, added Kruse, "we have objectives to cut that" more.
In computing terms, the p655 has a speed of 9 teraflops, (9 billion floating point calculations per second), which one IBM executive likened to conducting one calculation a second on a hand calculator for 285,000 years. More relevant to GM, the company will now be able to use the system to conduct complete vehicle crash simulations that used to take three days overnight, said Tom Tecco, GM's global director of computer-aided technology. The carmaker's goal for the p655 and its other hardware is to move as much design and engineering work as possible into this virtual world. It eliminated an entire phase in the development of Kappa. And it is already has eliminated about 85 percent of the crash tests requiring test vehicles, Kruse pointed out. "At a cost of $500,000 a vehicle, that's a substantial savings."
The giant automaker will roll out 29 new vehicles this year, about one every 22 days. Simply coming up with the resources to crash test so many vehicless would be impossible without the help of a supercomputer, never mind all the additional regulatory issues facing a manufacturer like General Motors, Kruse stressed. Going forward, GM believes that supercomputing is the only way it will be able to meet the needs of a fragmenting motor vehicle market. -Paul A. Eisenstein
GM says its new computer is super
General Motors will turn to IBM for the most powerful supercomputer ever used in the auto industry, a system which will "let us take months out of our development cycle," said Bob Kruse, GM's director of vehicle integration for North America, and "let us get the right product to the right niche of the market faster."
The new supercomputer, developed specifically for GM, is an IBM p655. It is, in a sense, a network of high-speed computers, made up of about 2000 separate IBM POWER4 and POWER5 processors and 145 individual servers. That means it can, in effect, serve a large number of clients and functions simultaneously. But when all those pieces are tied together, the new p655 will be more than twice as fast as the system it replaces, and "puts us on the scale of (computing power) being attained in the national laboratories," according to Bill Pulleybank, IBM director, Deep Computing Institute.
Government facilities, like Sandia and Los Alamos, use their incredible computing power to design nuclear weapons or predict weather patterns. GM will use its new digital system to push forward with its High-Performance Computing Initiative, which has already yielded a 40 percent improvement in engineering productivity. Before the switch to computer-aided design and engineering, it would typically take as much as five years to develop a new vehicle. The all-new Kappa platform, along with the new Pontiac Solstice roadster, required just 27 months. And some GM programs are down to 15 months, and, added Kruse, "we have objectives to cut that" more.
In computing terms, the p655 has a speed of 9 teraflops, (9 billion floating point calculations per second), which one IBM executive likened to conducting one calculation a second on a hand calculator for 285,000 years. More relevant to GM, the company will now be able to use the system to conduct complete vehicle crash simulations that used to take three days overnight, said Tom Tecco, GM's global director of computer-aided technology. The carmaker's goal for the p655 and its other hardware is to move as much design and engineering work as possible into this virtual world. It eliminated an entire phase in the development of Kappa. And it is already has eliminated about 85 percent of the crash tests requiring test vehicles, Kruse pointed out. "At a cost of $500,000 a vehicle, that's a substantial savings."
The giant automaker will roll out 29 new vehicles this year, about one every 22 days. Simply coming up with the resources to crash test so many vehicless would be impossible without the help of a supercomputer, never mind all the additional regulatory issues facing a manufacturer like General Motors, Kruse stressed. Going forward, GM believes that supercomputing is the only way it will be able to meet the needs of a fragmenting motor vehicle market. -Paul A. Eisenstein
Even if this is the case, you are going to bottleneck when you get to the suppliers bidding and tooling up for the new parts (I can't imagine that process time is included in the time frame quote), but hey, anything that gets things done quicker is good with me. I like how they specifically mention niche cars as well.
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From: South Bend, Indiana
Originally posted by CamaroJim
with all this BS reduction in development time they claim, shouldnt GM finish cars before they even start them by now?
with all this BS reduction in development time they claim, shouldnt GM finish cars before they even start them by now?
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From: TX Med Ctr
FYI: The article is a little off.
9 teraflops is not 9 billion floating point operations per second. That would be 9 gigaflops.
9 teraflops = 9000 gigaflops, or 9 trillion floating point operations per second.
9 teraflops is not 9 billion floating point operations per second. That would be 9 gigaflops.
9 teraflops = 9000 gigaflops, or 9 trillion floating point operations per second.
Last edited by HAZ-Matt; Apr 22, 2004 at 08:58 PM.
Registered User
Joined: Jul 2002
Posts: 2,472
From: South Bend, Indiana
Originally posted by HAZ-Matt
FYI: The article is a little off.
9 teraflops is not 9 billion floating point operations per second. That would be 9 gigaflops.
9 teraflops = 9000 gigaflops, or 9 trillion floating point operations per second.
FYI: The article is a little off.
9 teraflops is not 9 billion floating point operations per second. That would be 9 gigaflops.
9 teraflops = 9000 gigaflops, or 9 trillion floating point operations per second.
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