INDUSTRY

ARMONK, NY -- IBM today announced that General Motors has selected a supercomputing infrastructure based on IBM pSeries 690 servers to power the company's vehicle design applications. The infrastructure -- which will contain multiple systems, including the auto industry's most powerful supercomputer -- will increase GM's supercomputing muscle by a factor of four, helping the company further improve vehicle development processes. With a combined processing power of 4 trillion calculations per second, the infrastructure is key to GM's goal of using technology to drive faster business processes and cost reductions within the product development environment. "IBM p690 systems allow us to try scenarios on the computer that would be impossible to perform using traditional prototypes," said Kirk Gutmann, Global Develop Product Information Officer, General Motors. "Designing our next generation vehicles on IBM p690 helps us improve decision-making, speed cycle times, and ultimately, stay ahead of the competition." Using IBM p690, researchers can gather data without setting up as many physical tests. The IBM infrastructure will run sophisticated crash simulations, the results of which provide valuable safety information. It will also run software that performs a variety of analyses to ensure a vehicle's structural integrity and quality. Using this software, researchers can design vehicles with reduced noise and vibration, providing customers with a more comfortable driving experience. "General Motors is a proven leader in the use of technology to solve complex business and engineering challenges," said Jan Beauchamp, General Manager, IBM Automotive Industry. "IBM pSeries systems are uniquely designed to provide the scalability and performance required by General Motors' technical applications to improve design quality and reduce the time it takes to get their world-class automobiles to market." IBM Infrastructure: Spanning Two Continents General Motors selected IBM p690 systems for its facilities in Detroit, Michigan, Russelsheim, Germany, and Trollhattan, Sweden. The servers will be 32-way 1.3 GHz p690s with 2 GB memory per CPU. The servers will be harnessed together in a single system with a total processing power of 2.3 teraflops, making it one of the ten largest supercomputers in the world and the auto industry's most powerful supercomputer.