INDUSTRY

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- SGI® (NYSE: SGI) and ESI Group today announced new industry performance levels in crash simulation using the latest generation SGI supercomputer, the SGI® Origin® 3000 series server, and ESI Group's PAM-CRASH 2001 distributed memory parallel version, a world leading crash-test simulation software application. In simulation tests conducted by the SGI and ESI Group team, sustained performance of 19 GFLOPS was achieved using an SGI Origin 3000 series server with 126 MIPS® R14000 processors at 600 MHz. This represents exceptional computing power and the highest performance level achieved for PAM-CRASH in a crash simulation, beating the 12 GFLOPS sustained performance reached in October 2000 using an SGI Origin server and PAM-CRASH 2000 distributed memory parallel version on a BMW model. Performing the same simulation of a vehicle frontal crash cruising at 35 MPH, the vehicle model contained 120,000 elements with 117,500 contact segments split into 11 contact interfaces. A simulation of 70 microseconds (ms) of real time requiring about 58,000 time cycles ran in about 13 minutes, meaning a solution time of 0.114 ms per element/per cycle. Vincent Chaillou, vice president of sales and marketing, ESI Group, comments, "Refined models containing more than 1.5 million elements become vital and standard for in-depth evaluation of even more realistic product behavior taking into account the influence of manufacturing processes. PAM-CRASH 2001's distributed memory parallel version, when optimized with SGI Origin 3000 series servers, allows time-critical decision making for organizations committed to advanced and continuous collaborative engineering." "Pushing the performance envelope in crash simulation contributes to shorter product design cycles and ultimately improves the delivery of safe automobiles," said Knut Korsell, vice president of Industry Marketing, SGI. "The powerful capabilities and scalable performance of the SGI and ESI solution lets engineers explore various alternatives and gain valuable insight to achieve design improvements for crash simulation in less time." Enhance simulations with SGI's advanced visualization capabilities In addition to the SGI and ESI Group crash simulation solution, collaborative engineering environments can also benefit from SGI's OpenGL Vizserver(TM), software which provides universal access to visual information for enhanced simulations. When combined with the superior performance of the SGI® Origin® 3000 series server family, OpenGL Vizserver dramatically improves decision making in projects requiring and integrating multiple domains of expertise during a crash analysis, opening the door for computational steering during the simulation process. Computational steering means design engineers, for example, can change data during the simulation, an improved method over the current prediction-simulation-correction model. "With OpenGL Vizserver, the user can visualize the project and check the validity at any time during the computation. This enables quick diagnose and correction to the model early in the simulation process while dramatically reducing the time to reach a final decision," adds Korsell. For more information about SGI products and solutions designed for automotive, aerospace, and manufacturing professionals, visit http://www.sgi.com/industries/manufacturing/ . For more information about PAM-CRASH from ESI Group, visit http://www.esi-group.com/ .