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GM speeds time to market through blistering fast processors: General Motors' vehicle development process gets a big boost from the latest in supercomputers.

Article Excerpt
Supercomputing, what General Motors (GM; Detroit, MI) calls "high-performance computing" (HPC), is so valuable that the company will be more than doubling its supercomputing capacity by early next year. Its new supercomputers run at nine teraflops--9 trillion calculations per second, which is the equivalent of computing in one second one calculation per second for just over 285,000 years.

Impressive, yes, but one might wonder: "What's it good for?" In GM's case, a lot. Supercomputing is a crucial tool for vehicle development, from concept models at the early stages of design to more detailed models as the designs evolve. It is also one more "enabler" to global competitiveness.

THE VERY MODERN MODEL OF A SUPERCOMPUTER

This is not GM's first supercomputer. It's an upgrade to an existing system. Consider it a scheduled upgrade, given that much of GM's computing equipment is on a three-year lease. By swapping out equipment every three years, GM stays on the leading edge of computing technology and ahead of its computing needs.

GM's previous supercomputing system consisted of computers from IBM and Silicon Graphics Inc. (Mountain View, CA) combined in a four-way system. (A four-way system is one based on a microprocessor that can issue two integer and two floating-point instructions for every processor clock cycle, as opposed to just one of either.) For software, in addition to Unigraphics for computer-aided design (CAD) and product lifecycle management (PLM), the...