Increasing demands in terms of vehicle safety and comfort have led AUDI AG of Ingolstadt to step up its efforts to employ CAE technology (Computer Aided Engineering), and hence to introduce a new high-performance supercomputer. The VPP300E supercomputer from Siemens Nixdorf is being used in the development phase essentially to simulate and optimize the behavior of vehicle bodywork in crash situations. The power computer is also able to perform calculations with the aim of enhancing comfort, for example, by reducing vibrations. Comprehensive computer simulations are playing an increasingly important role in the development of new vehicles. Given the growing complexity of these applications, considerable demands are placed on the capacity of supercomputers. With 16 processors, a main memory of 32 gigabytes and computing performance reaching 40 GFLOPS (giga floating-point operations per second), the VPP300E system soon to be installed at AUDI is among the most powerful supercomputers in the automotive industry in Europe. In the long term, AUDI plans to implement as many vehicle engineering phases as possible by computer, with the aim of improving productivity and product quality as well as shortening development cycles. With the VPP300E, the carmaker is taking yet another step towards "virtual product development". The compute-intensive crash simulations are generated using Pam-Crash software from ESI/PSI, Paris. AUDI opted for Nastran from MSC in Los Angeles as the program system, to perform structural-dynamic analyses on the overall vehicle. Furthermore, to ensure optimum use of the available computer resources, the new VPP system can also perform complex computer simulations in the field of aerodynamics and metal pressing engineering. The supercomputer`s vector parallel processors (VPP) are produced by Fujitsu, Tokyo, based on state-of-the-art CMOS technology and are particularly noteworthy for their maximum single processor power, outstanding scalability and low power draw. The VPP system produced excellent results in benchmark tests with AUDI-specific CAE applications. Siemens Nixdorf was awarded overall responsibility for application and system consulting, systems engineering optimization (tuning) and system administration support. This is the first time a VPP system has been installed in the automotive industry in Europe, and Siemens Nixdorf and Fujitsu consider it an excellent result for their high-performance computer joint venture. Both companies will step up their activities in the field of highly compute-intensive engineering applications.
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