Appelbe said a key criteria for selection was price-performance. "We wanted the best-priced deal we could get for computing capacity on engineering jobs," he said, with the supercomputer expected to run a range of packaged engineering solutions such as LS-Dyna, Abaqus, Nastran and Star-CD. He said the cluster had to run a 64-bit architecture to deliver the capacity required to service the deal. Thirty-two bit architecture was determined to be inadequate, while a combined 32-64 bit solution was too fragmented for VPAC's application. "If you go to a solution that involves dealing with very large engineering problems, you need 64-bit architecture," he explained. The computing cluster is expected to allow engineers to develop very fine "mesh" with as many as half a million nodes and six degrees of freedom. This mesh is needed for simulations of design-crucial areas such as airflow within engine cylinders during activity. With air temperature and pressure varying widely at each small mesh node during engine activity, the ability to examine properties associated with these changes from a three-dimensional perspective is a crucial design asset. Appelbe noted that "that difference in air pressure impacts on performance. Achieving as close as identical airflow into all cylinders is a huge optimisation". He said the deal continued an ongoing "revolution in virtual engineering and virtual manufacturing," whereby traditional "rule of thumb" approaches to design were being replaced by highly-refined tools. Appelbe said another consideration of the deal was scalability, with VPAC envisaging a significant upgrade program. "Within a year, if we haven't added more capacity, we're not doing our job". He added the aggressive deployment of Itanium 2 solutions by vendors was rapidly increasing VPAC's options for future expansion. VPAC and Holden also assessed risk, examining each proposed solution against the danger of:
- a particular, necessary software product not running on the platform, or not delivering optimal performance;
- the machine having inadequate capacity;
- the machine being difficult or expensive to administer.
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