SGI and ESI Group solve scalability issues in car simulations

Mountain View, California, and Paris, France, 26 May 2005 —Silicon Graphics (NYSE: SGI) and ESI Group (ISIN FR0004110310) today announced they have pushed scalability to new extremes, enabling users to run a crash simulation model eight times larger than today’s standard industry practice. This achievement represents a significant competitive advantage for automotive designers confronted with ever-growing model sizes and shrinking turnaround time: SGI Altix 3000 achieves the highest performance in crash simulation with PAM-CRASH 2004 models.

Manufacturers today struggle to reduce delays in product design as they work with more and more refined models. To keep up with these time and quality constraints, they look for solutions that can scale with their growing needs. Today the typical full car simulation model size is 1.1 million elements and can be run overnight. In recent tests, SGI with ESI Group successfully ran a model of 9.1 million elements at 338.20 gigaflops per second performance on a SGI® Altix® 3700 Bx2 server with 512GB memory running PAM-CRASH 2004 on 512 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors.

On the high-density Altix system, SGI and ESI Group were able to deliver the crash case results on model with 9.1 million elements – eight times that of a typical model – within 8 hours 11 minutes, enabling engineers to use the results of the full case computation with increased precision as early as the next morning. This means that an engineer can run a model eight times more complicated within essentially the same time as a standard-sized model.

This outstanding result is made possible with a complement of the SGI Altix NUMAflex™ architecture with huge globally addressable shared-memory and PAM-CRASH software’s enhanced scalability. The solution enables engineers to cope with the expected growth of model size due to factors like model refinement, increased model fidelity, and modelling material rupture. Additionally, insurance companies rely on simulations to evaluate risks, including specific car-to-car and car-to-passenger interactions. With such a configuration car manufacturers can now address new applications such as the simulation of a detailed car body with trim, or investigate critical zones for rupture prediction.

"While high-performance computing hardware has moved toward scalable systems, ESI Group has invested in a new architecture for its crash test solution solver," said Vincent Chaillou, President and Chief Operating Officer, Product Operations, ESI Group. "The new generation of our parallel solver, first delivered in 2002, offers unprecedented scalability for full car model computations."

"The Altix server family offers tremendous flexibility in configuring for application-specific needs," said Christian Tanasescu, Director of Engineering, Simulation Applications, SGI. "Altix can be used in single system image configurations up to 512 processors or as a supercluster that equips up to 2,048 processors with globally addressable memory. With an industry-leading communication latency of less than one microsecond, SGI's NUMAflex interconnect enables PAM-CRASH to scale to dramatic new heights."

About SILICON GRAPHICS

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics Inc. – The Source of Innovation and Discovery™, is a leader in high-performance computing, visualisation and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it is sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defence, or enabling the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
For further information, please go to: www.sgi.com
About ESI Group
ESI Group is a pioneer and world-leading provider of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes that take into account the physics of materials. ESI Group has developed an entire suite of coherent, industry-oriented applications to simulate realistically a product’s behaviour during testing, to fine-tune the manufacturing processes in accordance with the desired product performance, and to evaluate the environment’s impact on product usage. ESI Group’s products, which have a proven track record in manufacturing and have been combined in multi-trade value chains, represent a unique collaborative, virtual engineering solution, known as the Virtual Try-Out Space® (VTOS®), enabling virtual prototypes to be improved in a continuous manner. By drastically reducing costs and development lead times, VTOS® solutions offer major competitive advantages by progressively eliminating the need for physical prototypes. ESI Group is listed on the Nouveau Marché of Euronext Paris, and generated sales of €60m in 2004. The company employs nearly 500 high-level specialists worldwide, and covers more than 30 countries.
For further information, please go to: www.esi-group.com
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