Daimler AG

Story Details

Headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, Daimler AG is one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers and the largest corporation in Germany by revenue. The organization’s Aerodynamics and Aeroacoustics Department, located in Sindelfingen, Germany, performs air force and wind noise testing on passenger cars. Specifically, department employees use modern technology to calculate the air forces that attack a driver’s body, as well as the noises that develop when wind flows around a vehicle. To conduct this testing, employees work with StarCD, a flow simulation program from CD-adapco.

Because of the high demands that this technology puts on servers, the department required extremely stable, high-performing hardware. The department also needed a technology platform that would provide enough memory to support the very large amount of data calculated during testing. Additionally, because it wanted to shorten the running times of jobs, the department sought a high-performance file storage system.

Two years ago, while evaluating solutions to meet these needs, the Daimler AG Aerodynamics and Aeroacoustics Department learned about a solution from Sun Microsystems that includes the Sun Fire X4100 M2 server, Sun Fire X4500 server, and Sun StorageTek 3320 SCSI Array disk-based memory system. “The server products were particularly convincing, especially because of their well-designed heat management,” says Dr. Volker Schwarz, Daimler AG team leader in the Aerodynamics and Aeroacoustics Department. “Ultimately, our demands in this regard are very high because of the density of the computers in the server rooms. Favorable heat management provides a long hardware service life.”

The department was attracted to the Sun StorageTek 3320 SCSI Array because of its ability to handle large data capacities, as well as its high availability. “This was ideally suited to the demands that our department was facing,” says Schwarz.

Following evaluation, the Aerodynamics and Aeroacoustics Department worked with Sun to put the solution through comprehensive testing to prove that it could manage jobs with long runtimes in a stable manner, in the shortest possible time frame. After satisfactorily completing this phase, the department worked with a third-party IT provider to implement the new solution.

The solution deployment occurred in two phases. In the first phase, the deployment team implemented the Sun Fire X4100 M2 server. During this time, the HPC nodes were installed in the available racks and the HPC platform’s InfiniBand network was integrated. Once these steps were completed, the incorporation into the department’s IT environment took place. To date, this part of the solution has proven to be completely stable and has run without any problems.

The department embarked on the second phase of deployment six months ago. This much larger implementation phase included the setup of the Sun Lustre File System, the Sun Fire X4500 server, and the Sun StorageTek 3320 SCSI Array. The deployment team implemented the high-performance Lustre file system with the goal of further shortening job runtimes and reducing bottlenecks.

So far, the solution’s memory capacity, high availability, and remote maintenance and management capabilities have proven to be effective. “Above all, we now have the ability to run jobs continuously, around the clock, with a highly available solution,” Schwarz says.