ACADEMIA

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- SGI (NYSE: SGI) and Netherlands-based TNO Automotive today announced availability of MADYMO 6.0.1, a new version of a leading simulation software package used to determine how airbags behave during automobile crashes. Optimized for fidelity, scalability and high performance by SGI engineers, TNO's MADYMO 6.0.1 slashes simulation times from approximately 48 hours to just two. Such a quantum leap in improvement creates new opportunities for the automobile safety industry. "Running a sophisticated and realistic airbag simulation with a turnover of only a few hours represents a substantial benefit to the safety market," said Paul Altamore, manager, Engineering Services, TNO Automotive North America. "The optimizations that SGI has delivered for this module reinforce the strong relationship between SGI and TNO," added Christian Tanasescu, SGI director of compute-intensive applications. "As the leading platform supplier for automotive design and simulation, we understand that scalability and high performance are critical to our customers' core businesses." MADYMO 6.0.1 features an optimized version of the advanced Airbag Gas Flow simulation module, developed by Century Dynamics, based in Horsham, U.K., and San Ramon, Calif., for the SGI® Origin® 300 and SGI® Origin® 3000 series server platforms. This module, embedded in MADYMO, models flow-related phenomena that cannot be resolved using traditional airbag-simulation methods. The first version of the module that was released with MADYMO 6.0 required approximately two days per airbag simulation, using a computation grid of 500,000 cells. It ran one processor within an SGI Origin 3000 series server. The new version requires approximately two hours, now using eight processors on the latest model of the same server family, using the same computation grid of 500,000 cells. MADYMO 6.0.1 features enhanced fidelity for simulations of side impacts and out-of-position occupant impacts, for which the accurate representation of the early phases of airbag deployment is especially critical. In today's automotive industry, virtual design is being integrated into the overall design process, particularly early design phases, during which numerical simulation and optimization validate new concepts before physical prototypes are built. Numerical simulation of new airbag technologies is important in predicting airbag performance accurately for government-regulated tests and for other accident scenarios.