Tech Success Awards: Making Cars Safer With Supercomputing

In the summer of 2012, TechWeekEurope launched the Tech Success Awards to celebrate IT projects that exceed expectations and make a difference.

Now, it is time to find more about the winners. The award for the most innovative IT project of 2011-2012 went to Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), for deploying Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) and High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure that has helped minimise physical testing while maximising the vehicle integrity.

By doing this, JLR has made its cars safer, more environmentally friendly, and ultimately reduced project cost and time-to-market.

Registration for this year’s Tech Success Awards is open, and we have added an extra category for security projects. So if your business has recently accomplished a feat of IT engineering, we want to know!

Digital crash test dummies

In 2010, recognising the importance of virtual testbeds, JLR developed a comprehensive HPC strategy that involved an internal private cloud consisting of six scalable compute clusters with high speed interconnects using an InfiniBand backbone.

It also introduced new engineering workstations all built from commodity technologies. The new tools were meant to help simulate crash tests before the production of physical prototypes, and the project was successfully delivered in late 2011.

JLR says that the ability to model systems virtually and test multiple different scenarios before committing to physical build enables significantly more robust car designs, and the new infrastructure has supported a 140 percent increase in the number of simulations JLR runs.

The update has helped reduce the total number of physical tests, saving significant investment in prototypes, logistics, transport and test facilities. By extension it also reduced the environmental impact of the development process.

Following the delivery of new HPC infrastructure, average job pending time was halved, data generation increased by over 280 percent, end user application performance increased two- or even threefold, and the power requirements of individual cores was reduced by a third.

We congratulate the team at JLR on their Tech Success!

You can already read more about the winner in the public sector IT category, the Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust or the winner in the cloud category, Orbian.

Look out for more stories about Tech Success winners in the coming weeks!

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