Magna Steyr

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Hurling crash test dummies against a concrete wall, as shown on TV, is not the only method of testing an automobile. Magna Steyr develops completely virtual crash tests to keep the development cycles and costs as low as possible. The testing goals are to improve the safety of passengers and pedestrians in case of an accident, and to optimize the comfort of passengers, such as controlling the temperature and environment. With the increasingly strict legal requirements of different countries, pedestrian and driver protection demand more computing power for crash test simulations.

With crash calculations, complex cumulative problems are divided into a straightforward number of single problems solved mathematically by a cluster of servers. Computer models can be improved with detail by adding more elements; while only about 100 elements were used in calculations 10 years ago, nearly 2 million elements are used today to create more effective crash test models. In addition, Magna Steyr’s thermal calculations and air stream simulations help designers test climate control systems, engine compartment streaming and component cooling.

Magna Steyr chose AMD Opteron processors for its new cluster, but also required that the memory be upgraded in the future from 4GB to 8GB, ruling out blade servers. “Blade servers were not flexible enough,” says Heinz Hauck, senior system engineer of Magna Steyr and responsible for the clusters in the company. “We would not have been able to expand the memory modules.” The company also required SCSI drives for durability, as the single nodes calculate and store data locally. “Sun was the only vendor that could fulfill these requirements without any problems and for a very favorable price,” adds Hauck. “As our requirements continuously increase, we have to invest in more performance. This way, we can offer more performance at the same price.”

The automotive manufacturer deployed 170 AMD Opteron processors in 85 Sun servers managed with Sun Grid Engine software. A part of the cluster can process a model with two million elements in less than two days, and a typical aerodynamics test takes only a few days rather than eight weeks. “The improvements enable us to calculate more models with more precision and in more detail, and also help us reduce costs,” says Dr. Bernd Fachbach, head of the crash test department. “Our models can grow with the performance of the cluster, enabling us to improve our tests.”