Armonk, N.Y. August 30, 2002 - IBM 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.
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.
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 See http://www.top500.org for a list of the world's largest supercomputers. Current as of August 2, 2002. and the auto industry's most powerful supercomputer.
World's Most Powerful Server
The IBM eServer p690 is the world's most powerful server. Based on SPECweb99 results posted on HYPERLINK http://www.spec.org http://www.spec.org. Current as of August 2, 2002. SPECweb99 is a trademark of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). Full results available at http://www.specbench.org/osg/web99/. The p690 is based on IBM's innovative POWER4 microprocessor, a system on a chip containing two one-gigahertz-plus processors, a high-bandwidth system switch, a large memory cache and I/O. This unique design enables the server to conserve energy and dramatically outperform Based on SPECfp2000 results posted on http://www.specbench.org. Results current as of August 2, 2002. SPECfp2000 is a trademark of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). servers that have more than twice as many processors.
The POWER4 chips are packaged in ultra-dense building blocks called multi-chip modules, which provides the equivalent processing power of much larger system boards in other high-end servers, while consuming less electricity.
About IBM
IBM is the number one server vendor in the world. For more information, visit www.ibm.com. According to 2001 IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.
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