PNNL chooses PAM-CRASH to run on its 512 processors IBM SP supercomputer

Paris 21 Oct 99 The US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), which is operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy, has chosen PAM-CRASH for the Northwest Alliance for Transportation Technologies (NATT) energy efficient vehicle initiative. PNNL owns IBM's largest non-defense supercomputing facilities in the US with a 512 and a 128 nodes SP-2.

Battelle is one of the world's largest private, independent technology organizations.

NATT's main focus is the development of technologies necessary to reduce the weight of vehicle by 50%. NATT's partners include the US Department of Energy and industrial participants such as the Boeing Company, Northwest lightweight aluminum, magnesium and titanium producers, and the three domestic car makers, DaimlerChrysler, Ford and General Motors.

For NATT, PNNL is exploring innovative designs and manufacturing techniques that take full advantage of light weight materials. Making sure that their performances, and especially crash test performances, are equivalent to currently used materials. "ESI Group has the technology to simulate highly dynamic impact problems on our IBM's SP-2 supercomputer" said Dr. Moe Khaleel, Deputy Director for Engineering Simulations Laboratory at PNNL. "PAM-CRASH is a crash simulation code that could exploit the power of the SP-2 parallel processing capabilities." PNNL owns IBM's largest non-defense supercomputing facilities in the US with a 512 and a 128 nodes SP-2.

As lightweight components are an obvious route to improve energy efficiency and meet increasingly stringent federal guidelines, PNNL is using PAM-CRASH to validate the crashworthiness of a new light weight SUV frame. Car frames are formed of several components, and once manufactured their real thickness might be slightly different from the design dimensions. PAM-CRASH, in combination of PNNL's in-house software, performs simulation of "as built" components to verify the overall performance of the frame.

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at Richland, Washington, is one of nine national, multiprogram laboratories. Pacific Northwest's core mission is to deliver environmental science and technology to meet key national needs. The lab also applies its capabilities to meet selected energy, health and national security needs, and makes contributions to America's economy and to the education of future scientists and engineers. The laboratory employs about 3,500 staff members and has an annual budget of more than $500 million. Battelle of Columbus, Ohio, has managed the lab for the federal government since its inception in 1965.

Visit www.pnl.gov/ for more information.

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