GM picks IBM for new supercomputer

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April 22, 2004 (IDG News Service) -- General Motors Corp. is building what it says will be the automotive industry's fastest supercomputer by tying together scores of IBM 655 pSeries servers.
The system will offer a maximum performance of about 9 TFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second), more than double the capacity of GM's current computing system, which was also supplied by IBM, GM officials said in a conference call with reporters yesterday. The hardware is designed to help the automaker reduce development time and costs.
Once complete, the system will be powerful enough to earn a spot among the top 10 most powerful supercomputers worldwide, said Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H. "Nine TFLOPS is a big, big system," he said.
GM is taking delivery now of 128 pSeries 655 systems, each with eight 1.7-GHz Power4+ processors, and 16 pSeries 655 systems, each with four Power4+ processors, said Frank Roney, managing director of the GM account at IBM. The system will be expanded later this year with additional IBM servers based on the new Power5 processors, he said.
For competitive reasons, GM declined to say how many Power5-based servers it plans to add to the system or how it is tying the servers together. "That would get a level of detail on the street that would not be an advantage to GM," said Chris Perry, a GM spokesman.
Over the past decade, crash testing has become the largest user of computing power at GM. By relying on virtual crash tests, the carmaker has been able to reduce the number of tests involving real vehicles by 85%, said Terry Kline, global product development process information officer at GM. "About 80% of the computing power goes toward crash and safety analysis," he said.
At a cost of $500,000 per vehicle crash test, savings from virtual testing add up quickly, said Robert Kruse, executive director of vehicle integration at GM. With the new IBM system, the time it takes to do some crash simulations can be reduced from three days to one, he said.
GM still does about 1,200 crash tests per year involving actual automobiles, partly because real tests are needed for government certification of the vehicles, company officials said.
According to the November 2003 list of the top 500 supercomputers, the Earth Simulator in Japan is currently the fastest machine, with a peak performance of 40.9 TFLOPS. Computers on the list are ranked by the maximum number of FLOPS achieved during a benchmark test.
"The pSeries 655 is a sufficiently dense system that many data centers have to reinforce their floors to bring it in. It is more computing per cubic inch thanthe average mainframe or big server from most of the vendors," Illuminata's Eunice said.
The servers will be housed at GM's data center in Michigan, and hardware service and maintenance will be provided by IBM. Financial details of the deal weren't disclosed, though IBM has said in the past that a pSeries 655 with eight 1.7-GHz Power4+ processors, 1GB of memory and two 36.4GB disk drives starts at about $70,000.

Reprinted with permission from

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