Skoda Taps SGI Altix ICE for CAE

SGI announced that Skoda Auto a.s., a European car firm and daughter company of the VW Group, a leading manufacturer of automobiles, has selected SGI Altix ICE to augment its computer-aided engineering (CAE) system.

Being subject to the rigorous emissions standards and safety legislation that defines today’s automotive industry, Skoda Auto’s R&D department requires extreme high performance and scalable computing systems for complex product performance and safety analysis. To meet these technical and compliance requirements, Skoda has selected an SGI Altix ICE 8200 EX supercomputer with 1,024 processors and over 20 terabytes of dedicated hard disk capacity.

The SGI supercomputer installation will be used primarily for computational fluid dynamics analysis using ANSYS FLUENT and OpenFOAM, and for crash analysis using ESI Group PAM-CRASH software. The new system provides Skoda with processing power of 12 teraflops, allowing engineers to reduce processing time, speed automobile development, and improve design efficiency, quality and safety.

“Product quality and safety, together with advantageous pricing for our customers, is our utmost priority,” said Karel Švábek, head of Skoda Frontloading department. “With the SGI Altix ICE installation we will be able to rapidly develop more innovative vehicles with excellent value-to-price ratios.”

The Altix ICE system, based on the Intel Xeon Nehalem architecture, enables Skoda to achieve more with its computing resources over a shorter period of time. SGI’s leading Eco-Logical design also offers compelling energy and management efficiency gains.

“Automotive companies are faced with more demanding computing applications every day with ever-growing amounts of data to manage and process, and pressure to deliver results in record time,” said Joop Ruijgrok, vice president of SGI EMEA. “With Altix ICE supercomputers, Skoda can now easily scale to meet processing requirements as they develop, while attaining new density levels, efficiency, reliability and manageability.”