Fast car: Voltaire to advance auto safety standards for Audi
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 6/30/2008 2:15:00 PM
Audi is using Voltaire's Grid Director switches as part of a Hewlett-Packard (HP) supercomputer to advance Audi's auto safety standards This is said to be the auto industry's fastest supercomputer, ranked No. 81 on the TOP 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.
The system reportedly saves days of computing time along with unnecessary costs for vehicle safety simulations. The use of Voltaire InfiniBand switches and software for the supercomputer's cluster interconnect greatly improves the simulation software's performance, allowing deeper and faster analysis, and reductions in design time needed for new car models.
Voltaire Grid Director switches use 20 Gbps InfiniBand technology, which delivers high bandwidth and very low latency to enhance the infrastructure and application performance. The switches generate the throughput and scalability needed to capture the full power of the servers to calculate the tremendous volumes of data generated during the simulation process.
The HP supercomputer enables Audi to run more model simulations overnight, thus ensuring an effective design process that enhances the analysis of the safety elements of its vehicles.
"Audi has slashed days off the computing time required for vehicle safety simulations," says Ed Turkel, a manager for Scalable Computing & Infrastructure at HP. "HP's optimized clustered solutions for computer-aided engineering applications enable customers to run more complex simulations faster, speeding time-to-result and delivering tangible return-on-investment quickly."
