Extending its Power architecture into the automotive field, IBM on Wednesday inked a major supercomputing contract with General Motors
, agreeing to provide 145 p655 servers for the automaker to use in auto development and virtual crash simulations.
Total cost of the contract, valued in the millions of dollars, was not made
public. The servers, which will run at nine teraflops, or trillions of
calculations per second, will work in congress as a supercomputer and will
perform tasks twice as fast as the previous IBM pSeries 690 systems GM began
using in 2002.
The p655 package for GM will include a combination of 8-way and 16-way
machines, which will be powered by Power4+. GM will procure an additional
p655 machines, which will be powered by POWER 5 chips later this year. The
complete supercomputer will run AIX
processors total, with chip speeds of 1.7 gigahertz compared to the $1.5 GHz
of previous pSeries used by GM.
The compute power delivered by the new machine is equivalent to doing one
calculation per second on a calculator for more than 285,000 years, IBM
officials said on a conference call.
The increased processing speed will significantly boost GM’s time-to-market
in a highly competitive auto industry. Bob Cruz, executive director of
vehicle integration for GM, said the high-performance computing contract
with IBM will help the company roll out 29 new or redesigned vehicles (a new
vehicle every 22 days).
Cruz said on the call that the machines will also reduce the number of
physical crash tests the company performs by 85 percent. At $500,000 per
crash test, the cost savings of the virtual crash simulations is
substantial.
Digital simulation and design modifications will also be conducted much
faster, reducing testing time from months and weeks to hours and minutes.
Eighty percent of the supercomputer’s power will be applied to crash or
safety analysis, and crash simulations that normally take three days can be
completed overnight, GM officials said.
“GM has purchased the automotive industry’s fastest supercomputing from
IBM,” Cruz said on a conference call. “This supercomputer is the latest tool
GM is providing its engineers to drive faster, better product development.”
In one example, the Pontiac Solstice was created in record time and at low
cost using GM’s computer network, the executive said, through a heavy
reliance on digital design and validation. In a current example, GM was able
to redesign the surface of its Chevrolet Equinox model in only 15 weeks in
the model of the vehicle’s development process using IBM servers.
Even though IBM is replacing its own servers with new, more powerful
machines, the contract renewal is a coup of sorts for IBM, which is seeking
to maintain its status as a superpower of large-scale systems, an arena
where HP , Cray
and Sun Microsystems
also compete.
Bill Pulleybank, director of IBM’s Deep Computing Institute, put the power
of the GM supercomputer in perspective on the call.
“Anytime we get to a computer that is above one teraflop, it begins to count
in the pantheon of the largest supercomputers in the world,” Pulleyblank
said. “When we get close to 10 teraflops, this puts us in the scale in what
is typically obtained in the national laboratories or in the very large
computing centers.
By way of comparison, Pulleyblank noted that IBM’s ASCI-White was the
largest supercomputer in the world a few years ago at 13 teraflops, “so this
is a very large supercomputing capability.”
The Armonk, N.Y., company already enjoys success in creating supercomputers
for research and scientific institutions, but solidifying this contract with
GM crystallizes Big Blue’s presence in the commercial space as well.
The endorsement of the POWER 4+ and forthcoming POWER5 chips is also a
strategy win for IBM, which has been aggressively pushing
its own architecture to be as pervasive as possible: POWER has found
placement in anything from consumer electronics, such as gaming consoles, to
large-scale enterprise deployments, including the new pact with GM.
