Hyundai Selects SGI Altix Server for Design and Analysis

Heavy Industry (HHI) has deployed an SGI(R) Altix(R) 350 server with 8 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors, to meet the computing power needed for building ships to safely deliver goods and products, including liquefied petroleum and gas products. Hyundai Heavy Industry has so far secured orders for 56 ships which amount to about 5.4 billion dollars in five months in 2005, including an order for eight oil container carriers and four LPG carriers from Iran and Qatar. As the new ship building orders and the total order backlog for HHI's shipbuilding division has increased, HHI decided to deploy the SGI Altix system to increase its productivity. The addition of the new server arms HHI with Altix systems with a total of thirty-two processors, including the 24-processor Altix server deployed in the mid 2004. According to HHI, the SGI Altix system is used for strength, durability and vibration structure analysis of large container vessels, very large crude carriers (VLCC), liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) carriers, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers. It is also being applied for coupled structure analysis considering "sloshing" impact load. Mr. Kwon, Jin Chil of Ship Building Division of Hyundai Heavy Industry said, "When LNG carriers transfer liquefied natural gas over a long distance, the liquefied natural gas strikes hard on the ship tank's wall. In order to analyze the sloshing impact load on the walls of the vessel, we needed very large scalable computing power. With the SGI Altix server, we have improved MSC.Dytran work process from 15 days to 2 days or less." Hyundai Heavy Industry's Altix purchase was based on a benchmark conducted by HHI of IBM, SUN, HP and SGI servers. The SGI Altix 350 server proved to have the best performance, delivering twice the performance of both the SUN Sunfire v6800 and IBM p670. More specifically, SGI Altix server recorded the lowest gap between its full load performance and its single load performance. For this test, the lower is better. The SGI Altix server family leverages SGI(R) NUMAflex(TM) architecture, which provides the ability for 512 processors to operate under a single system image under a super cluster environment. SGI NUMAlink interconnect with 12.8GB bandwidth per second, provides 50 times faster bandwidth, compared to Ethernet, and its latency is under 1 microsecond, which is the best in the IT industry. The SGI NUMAflex architecture and NUMAlink interconnect is an optimal solution for large scale calculations. Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2 processor based on EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction-set Computing) technology is ideal for applications requiring high processing power and large memory capacity. Through Hyundai Heavy Industry's first Altix deployment, Hyundai Heavy Industry has reduced the time of MSC.Dytran processing from 7-15 days to 2 days, and the time of MSC.Nastran processing from existing 8 hours to 10 minutes. SGI rapidly expands 64-bit IA server market to the technical customers, such as HKMC, Samsung Renault, Tata Daewoo, and Hyundai Heavy Industry. "In addition to performance, reliability and availability advantages, the Itanium 2 processor based platform will help enterprise customers maximize their return on investment with reduced operating costs, added scalability and availability. Intel Itanium 2 based platform is especially suitable for customers with mission critical applications and huge amounts of data to manage -- HHI is one such example of this." said HS Lee, country manager of Intel Korea.