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By Stephen Shankland, 22 April 2004 08:15

NEWS General Motors has purchased an IBM supercomputer capable of performing nine trillion calculations per second to speed up crash and safety simulations, a significant shot in the arm for Big Blue's supercomputer effort.

The system, a cluster of Unix servers connected with a high-speed network, will use more than 2,000 processors. About half are in a collection of 145 p655 servers being installed now that use IBM's Power4 processor, and the remainder are Power5 processors in servers scheduled to arrive by the end of the year, GM and IBM executives said Wednesday.

The system, twice as fast as an earlier IBM supercomputer at GM, is "most likely the most powerful system of any industrial company," said Frank Roney, IBM's lead salesman for the GM account, in a news conference. The companies wouldn't disclose the system's price.

The performance of GM's new machine - nine trillion calculations per second, or nine teraflops - is equivalent to the fourth-fastest system on the most recent list of top 500 supercomputers, though that list will be updated at least once by the time GM's system is fully operational.

The GM supercomputer will be used to improve automotive safety research by simulating crashes with mathematical models rather than performing real-world crash tests, said Robert A. Kruse Jr., GM's executive director of vehicle integration. "At a cost of $500,000 per [crash test] vehicle, this has resulted in substantial savings," as well as the ability to test more designs than was previously possible, Kruse said.

Stephen Shankland writes for News.com