Impact at a Glance
ORNL's Jaguar is DOE's flagship supercomputer.
ORNL's Jaguar
Jaguar is DOE's flagship supercomputer. With almost a quarter of a million processing cores and a theoretical peak computational capability of 2.3 petaflops, the world's largest Cray XT was more than able to provide SmartTruck Systems (See previous SmartTruck Article) with all the computational power it needed. (A petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and refers to a thousand trillion [one quadrillion] floating point operations per second.) In addition, SmartTruck opted to run the FUN3D application, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's CFD software that is used widely in the aerospace industry.
Challenge
- Design retrofit parts for Class 8 long-haul trucks (18-wheelers) to improve fuel efficiency in time to meet looming California regulations
Solution
- Tap into the power of Jaguar, the Department of Energy's flagship high-performance computer at ORNL, to run detailed simulations in record time
High-performance computing impact
- Run simulations based on the most complex tractor and trailer model ever devised instead of simplified models, and run them faster
- Dramatically shorten design turnaround from days to a few hours
- Eliminate the need for costly and time-consuming physical prototypes
Business benefits
- Significantly reduce time-to-market for new products from more than 3 years to 18 months
- Pass EPA tests with new parts on first attempt, an unprecedented result in this industry
- Increase revenue and market share opportunity
- Assume leadership position in an emerging industry with great potential
- Strengthen the manufacturers engaged in production