NEWS: The million dollar computer that crashes all day

By Michael Banovsky

It’s not every day that someone brags about their computer crashing (except Windows users, of course), but Volvo isn’t a normal person. It’s not a person at all. Volvo is a team of androids whose only goal is to produce the safest cars in the world.

Aided by their new computer, Volvo employees (who are seriously not androids) are able to do an entire crash simulation in five hours, as opposed to their old computer that took three days. But at least they didn’t have to worry about pop-ups!

From Volvo Canada:

“GÖTEBORG (June 22, 2005) - Volvo Car Corporation, the recognized leader in automotive safety research, has commissioned one of the world's most powerful supercomputers to simulate vehicle collisions. Using a collection of more than 300 processors, the crash simulator works around the clock to accelerate 'real life' safety engineering and reduce the development time of new Volvo automobiles.

With computing power that is the equivalent to more than 1,000 ordinary home PCs, this new supercomputer has effectively doubled Volvo Cars' virtual crash simulation capacity and is a natural continuation of the company's long-term commitment to safety research.

"Investing in cutting-edge virtual development resources will help us to achieve our aim of making Volvo's real-life cars the safest on the market," says Anders Djärv, head of Crash Simulation at the Volvo Car Safety Centre in Sweden.

Advanced development of virtual crash tests was initiated three years ago to make use of the company's cost-effective Linux clusters. Supercomputers have been integral to the Volvo Cars vehicle development strategy since the 1987 development of the Volvo 850. At that time, high-capacity computers were used to perform flow, panel pressing and crash simulation calculations.

With the installation of Volvo Cars' new supercomputer, the company has achieved its goal of developing sufficient computing capacity to enable crash simulation engineers to input test data before going home in the evening and have the results waiting for them the following morning. Reviewed together with the design engineers during the day, crash engineers can then assemble fresh input data for that night. The result is that Volvo Cars can conduct crash safety research 24 hours a day.

The new supercomputer consists of 151 nodes (IBM eServers 325), each consisting of two CPUs, for a total of 302 AMD Opteron processors. The measured capacity is 1.3 TFlops (peak), making it one of the fastest Linux clusters in the automotive industry. Although it's a fairly approximate measure, the capacity is equivalent to more than 1,000 ordinary home PCs!