IBM Scores General Motors Supercomputer Contract

IBM provided a combination of the hardware, software and integration services, the company said last week. The systems, 16 of which are in its Detroit data centers and six are distributed throughout the world, will reduce the time it takes to compute high performance computer aided designs by processing jobs, IBM officials said.

Based on IBM's Unix-based pSeries 690 servers running the company's Power4 processor, IBM said GM has the automotive industry's largest supercomputer network. Linked together it will have a combined processing power of 4 trillion calculations per second. Each 32-way server will have 2 gigabytes of memory per CPU.

While the deal was a noteworthy hardware and software win for IBM, supercomputer implementations require significant customization. Such an architecture is needed by manufacturing companies engaging in full product lifecycle management initiatives, where the systems need to handle everything from I/O, compute and memory-intensive engineering and design, through manufacturing to release of the final product, said Giga Information Group analyst Brad Day.

"It's hard to find a general purpose machine that can double in both directions," Day said. "That's the story here, they can use one flavor Unix, one class of systems architecture to take it from the most demanding engineering development work all the way through every aspect of the product lifecycle."

Computing jobs that previously took three days to process can now run in about 12 hours, said Bernard Schwartz, IBM's client executive-General Motors. Such implementations require consulting services from IBM Global Services and the company's automotive sector practice group to tune applications for the computing environment, Schwartz said. "There's not as much attention to tuning a commercial application as you would in a high-performance engineering scenario where you're trying to get an awful amount of work from the computer in as short a time as possible."

The servers are running on GM's global data network. EDS, GM's outsourcing provider, conducted the vendor analysis, Schwartz said.