ESI Group and the IT group Bull in partnership

ESI Group and the IT group Bull have announced a partnership agreement to validate the leading crash-simulation application, Pam-Crash, on Bull NovaScale servers and Bull NovaScale clusters

ESI Group and the IT group Bull have announced a partnership agreement to validate the leading Crash-simulation application, Pam-Crash, on Bull NovaScale servers and Bull NovaScale clusters.

The agreement between the two companies will be completed by the full validation of the ESI Group simulation solutions on Bull NovaScale servers.

The virtual prototyping solution Pam-Crash, which is widely used in the automotive sector, has been specially ported and optimised to take advantage of the Bull NovaScale server architecture and clusters scalability.

Vincent Chaillou, President and Chief Operating Officer of Product Operations at ESI Group, declares, "ESI Group welcomes Bull as a new hardware partner; the availability of Pam-Crash on NovaScale will offer our customers an attractive choice to run their Crash simulations.

We are particularly pleased to work with a European hardware company to support our local users for system integration with their excellent performance and large experience".

Benefiting from the close cooperation between ESI Group and Bull technical experts, full scale tests of car-to-car Crashes (a two-million element model of a Neon car) have been modelled and simulated on a NovaScale cluster of 128 Intel Itanium2 processors.

These tests have shown a very high level of performance and scalability, with a reported 89% efficiency on 64 processors and more than 78% efficiency on the full 128, thus enabling critically important overnight restitution times for the highly detailed models that are today required in the automotive industry.

Jean-Francois Lavignon, General Manager of the Bull HPC Business Unit, says, "Bull is extremely pleased that ESI Group has certified Pam-Crash on our NovaScale platform, making it a key addition to the growing portfolio of Mechanical Computer Aided Engineering applications that take advantage of our servers and clusters capabilities.

Some prestigious customers are already using Pam-Crash on Bull NovaScale servers.

Our customers will be able to take advantage of ESI industry solutions on the whole range of Bull NovaScale platforms with a choice between the Intel Itanium2 and Xeon double core processors".

Bull and ESI Group R+D teams also work together on Fame2, one of the leading projects of the System@tic competitiveness cluster.

The teams help to enhance the scalability levels of the ESI Group industry solutions on NovaScale systems, in order to allow the industrial usage of even more detailed models.

Ultimately, this work will allow car vendors to add more security enhancements in the design of new car models without affecting their budget and their time-to-market requirements.

Bull HPC solutions are built using the two Bull NovaScale server families: NovaScale Intensive, based on Intel Itanium2 dual-core processors, and NovaScale Universal, based on Intel Xeon dual-core processors.

NovaScale servers combine significant processing power with the cost optimisation that comes from using industry-standard components, as well as building on Bull longandshy;standing expertise in major corporate IT systems.

From entry-level to high-end models, NovaScale servers can go up to 32 sockets.

They are specifically designed to be integrated into even the largest and most complex computing infrastructures.

The diversity of the range means it is possible to build a tailored platform that is perfectly adapted to support any application.

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