22.4.2004
GM enhances Vehicle Development Process with industry's fastest supercomputer

GM's newest supercomputer, based on IBM's POWER4 technology, allows greater global collaboration, improved validation testing and, ultimately, reduced product-development costs.

GM has just purchased the automotive industry's fastest supercomputer from IBM. GM's newest supercomputer, based on IBM's POWER4 technology, allows greater global collaboration, improved validation testing and, ultimately, reduced product-development costs.

"The automobile industry is increasingly reliant upon computers to develop and test vehicles. Our state-of-the-art computing platform allows us to shorten the time it takes to bring a vehicle to market from 48 to 18 months for some vehicles and significantly reduce structural costs in the process," said Jim Queen, vice president, GM North America Engineering. "Thanks to high performance computing GM can move faster, introduce more new vehicles and keep pace with changing consumer preferences."

GM's newest supercomputer more than doubles its high performance computing capacity, again placing it as the automotive industry's fastest machine by a wide margin. The level of compute power delivered by the new machine carries the equivalent of doing one calculation per second on a calculator for more than 285,000 years.

Design modifications and engineering issues that once took months or weeks to resolve can now be handled in minutes or hours. Over the past 10 years, crash simulation has become the largest user of high-performance computer resources at GM, helping to lower vehicle production costs by cutting down the number of costly, full-size crash models that need to be built as digital computer simulations do much of the work.

The following are examples of recent high performance computing work within GM:

Innovative New Products -- Thanks to high-performance computing, GM can develop new, low-cost vehicle architectures faster than ever before. When the call came out to turn the Pontiac Solstice concept into a reality, GM created the new Kappa platform and the Pontiac Solstice in record time and at a low cost by using GM's computing network. With a heavy reliance on digital design and validation, the team was able to shorten the time it would take to develop and test this important new product. They were able to deliver a completely new architecture and product in 27 months.

Global Collaboration and Product Development -- Creating products globally requires a high reliance on computing resources and virtual collaboration tools. The GTO team, working with the engineering and manufacturing staff at Holden Ltd. in Australia, benefited from GM's ability to share large data files between the 16 global engineering centers. This allowed the engineering team to conduct work in both Michigan and Australia seamlessly.

Increased Cost Savings -- The increased use and reliance on digital testing has allowed GM to eliminate a large part of the cost of building and testing vehicles. By relying upon virtual crash tests, GM has been able to reduce the number of crash vehicles needed by more than 85%.

IBM won the GM contract based upon product performance, physical packaging and its commitment to deliver additional capacity in 2004 to meet GM's rising engineering and analytical demands. With this deal IBM becomes the major supplier of supercomputers to GM worldwide and establishes its technology as a global standard for high performance computing.