Case Study 3: NCAC
The NCAC came into being in 1992 with a joint contract between the Federal Highway Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Affiliated with the George Washington University in Virginia, NCAC is part of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the George Washington University, and shares its data—including over 14,000 crash test films that can be ordered online—with interested parties worldwide.
The NCAC first partnered with Hewlett-Packard Company in 1996, after receiving a joint research grant from American Automotive Manufacturers Association and the US Department of Transportation to evaluate the current state-of-the-art parallel computers running crash computing software.
“It was during this evaluation that we first started working with HP,” explained Kan. “Back then we were also looking at Cray, IBM and Silicon Graphics. Since then, we have developed a strong technology partnership with HP. As such, we have evaluated all of HP's high-end platforms, starting with the HP 9000 V-Class Enterprise Servers, and finally to HP's new Itanium™ - based system.”
With simulated modeling analysis performed by the FHWA/NHTSA National Crash Analysis Center at the George Washington University, it's no surprise to see weighty reports with such heady titles as:
“Crash Exposure and Crashworthiness of Sport Utility Vehicles.”
“Injury Patterns Among Belted Drivers Protected by Air Bags in 30 to 35 mph Crashes.”
“Chest Injury Risks to Drivers for Alternative Air Bag Inflation Rates.”
These are but a few of the hundreds of vehicle crash test analysis reports that come out of the NCAC film library—tests that are performed with the expressed purpose of saving the lives of drivers and passengers.
According to Cing-Dao “Steve” Kan, Director of Simulation and Modeling Research at the NCAC, “We typically perform complex computer simulation of vehicle impact—including car to car crashes—many times over in conjunction with the Department of Transportation and leaders in the automotive industry, such as Ford, Chrysler and GM.”
He continued, “In the past we have developed detailed computer models for the assessment of the crash-worthiness of vehicles, all of which require an immense amount of computational power. As the modeling analysis becomes more complex, the need for a high-end supercomputer is essential.”
Kan states that, “The recently installed 4-Way HP rx4610 Itanium®-based Server was up and running within a week of delivery—and there was absolutely no learning curve to deal with. As far as we were concerned, it was just another HP-UX system.”
The introduction of Itanium™-based servers marks a new chapter in enterprise-class computing. It establishes a solid foundation designed to deliver the performance, innovation and price to customers like NCAC.
Co-developed with Intel, the 4-Way HP rx4610 that NCAC installed is one of three Itanium™-based systems utilizing the Intel® Itanium™ Instruction Set Architecture that was co-developed by HP. Also available are the HP-UX, a 64-bit UNIX operating system, is optimized for the Itanium™-based architecture to provide the performance, scalability and reliability NCAC has come to expect from the HP-UX operating environment.
“We started running several large modeling programs immediately,” Kan confirmed. “Our compact-sized vehicle program has about 300,000 element models within it—the industry standard size of program for benchmarking—with 1.8 million degrees of freedom.” With their tests to date, NCAC has determined that the HP rx4610 server is four times faster than the V-Class, per CPU. As Kan explained, “In terms of bus speed the V-Class has around 200Mhz, and the rx4610 has 775Mhz—again four times as fast. When we're running the UNIX applications, it's definitely four times faster than the V-Class, and against the Silicon Graphics 2000, the Itanium™-based system is about three times faster.”
NCAC will continually run several different types of jobs at one time to analyze performance across various types of software, and to confirm that the programs all run as expected on the parallel platform.
Kan noted, “We run tests with DSMP, MTP, MPI and also message passing, starting with one CPU, then adding another one by one, just to see how the scalability compares with the other platforms we've tested. The test results with the rx4610 have been beyond my expectations.”
According to Kan, a typical crash event—such as a car crashing into a wall—occurs within 150 milliseconds. He's happy to confirm that “now we can run the software to see what happens when a car runs into a highway barrier and gets bounced back onto the highway. This whole event would take 2-3 seconds, a simulation that is much longer in duration. The CPU cycles are much more intensive, which is why we want to see how the parallel performance behaves.”
Software and support services
NCAC is currently using LS/DYNA software. HP partners with MDA software vendors to optimize their programs for HP platforms. This partnership means that designers using HP systems have the application performance to evaluate more design options and do more accurate analysis.
Kan concluded, “We've found the support team at HP to be very helpful as well. They assisted with the set-up and having direct access to the performance specialists in Dallas has been most gratifying. We also worked with the group of consultants that are porting LS/DYNA and assisted in creating the executable code, allowing us to compare our performance results with HP's.”
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