Audi selects Fujitsu Siemens' powerful hpcLine supercomputer to simulate car crashesHeidelberg 22 jun 2001 At the SC 2001 Press Conference, Mr. Eric Schnepf from Fujitsu Siemens was proud to announce a freshly signed contract with the car manufacturer Audi, headquartered in Ingolstadt. Audi has selected Fujitsu Siemens to deliver the supercomputer hpcLine with 128 processors for its new strategic competence centre where stochastic crash simulations are being performed. After evaluating several RISC based and Intel based solutions, Audi's choice fell on Fujitsu's Intel based computing platform to simulate random crash scenarios. The system will be customised to meet Audi's specific needs for scientific and technical applications, and will consist of an integrated Linux cluster system based on 52 Pentium III dual processor nodes and 24 Pentium 4 nodes.
Audi already used a 32 CPU hpcLine, developed by Fujitsu Siemens Computers to run simulations of electro-magnetic compliance, so the company is confident that the 128 CPU system offers the best choice for its new strategic competence centre. Audi recently won a four star safety rating for the latest A4 fair in the Euro NCAP crash test and the management is keen on maintaining their reputation for safety and technological development.
"The hpcLine Linux cluster has delivered excellent benchmark results for Audi-specific application benchmarks and has proven to be highly competitive in pricing", stated Karl Huber, CAE System Manager at Audi. "In addition, Fujitsu Siemens Computers was qualified by proving a highly integrated IT-competence through its hardware and Linux operating system for a comprehensive support in order to ensure a high availability and reliability with the hpcLine system in productive operation."
Eric Schnepf, Manager High Performance Computing at Fujitsu Siemens Computers, explained: "The benefit of offering such a wide range of high performance components means that Fujitsu Siemens Computers can provide flexible, scalable configurations in a variety of scientific fields such as fluid dynamics and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE). This flexibility is demonstrated by the two very different solutions from the hpcLine that Audi is currently using in its technical development, the 32 CPU system and now additionally the 128 CPU system."
The hpcLine is a very compact, rack-integrated, Intel based Linux cluster system for scientific and engineering applications. A full portfolio of high performance and system components permits scalable configurations ranging from starter kits with 8 compute nodes through to systems with hundreds of processors. Compute node variants are available with Dual Intel Pentium III, Intel Pentium 4 and Dual Intel Itanium. Each variant is based on standard components of the Primergy servers of Celsius workstations. A high speed network, for instance SCI or Myrinet, is also available as an option.
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