Ford buys two additional SV1 systemsSeattle 13 August 2000 Ford Motor Company recently acquired two additional Cray SV1 supercomputers, making it the company's largest Cray SV1 customer with a total of five systems. Ford will use the new machines to perform safety and structural analysis and speed time to market for its latest vehicle models. Financial terms were not disclosed.
These new systems give Ford a total of 80 Cray SV1 processors and
102 gigabytes of memory. Like Ford's other three Cray SV1
supercomputers, they replace existing Cray J90 machines and
provide additional computing power. One of the new systems is housed
at Ford's product development center in Dunton, England, while the
other, used as a file server, is located within Ford's data center in
Dearborn, Mich.
Ford's fleet of Cray SV1 systems run NASTRAN and RADIOSS
applications, which its engineers use to simulate the crash worthiness
of new vehicle designs and run noise, vibration and harshness (NVH)
tests. This process allows Ford to reduce the need for costly
prototypes and accelerate the development cycle.
``Ford's continued commitment to Cray technology and the UNICOS
operating environment reinforces Cray's dominance in the manufacturing
industry - one of our key market segments,'' said Rene Copeland, Cray
Inc. vice president of sales and marketing. ``We're honored to serve
customers like Ford, whose insatiable appetite for real-world
computational power pushes us to deliver superior systems.''
The Cray SV1 product line combines world-class single-processor
performance with outstanding price/performance, scalability from
entry-level to teraflops-level sizes and the ability to run an
industry-leading library of third-party vector applications. Named
``Supercomputer Product of the Year'' by Scientific Computing and
Automation magazine in 1999, the Cray SV1 supercomputer will be
succeeded by the company's next-generation Cray SV2 system in
2002.
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