SOLUTIONS THAT CAN SCALE WITH GROWING NEEDS

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SOLUTIONS THAT CAN SCALE WITH GROWING NEEDS
26 May 2005 - ESI Group

Manufacturers today struggle to reduce delays in product design as they work with more and more refined models. To keep up with these time and quality constraints, they look for solutions that can scale with their growing needs. Silicon Graphics and ESI Group (ISIN FR0004110310) today announced they have pushed scalability to new extremes, enabling users to run a crash simulation model eight times larger than today's standard industry practice. The achievement represents a significant competitive advantage for automotive designers confronted with ever growing model sizes and shrinking turnaround time.

Today the typical full car simulation model size is 1.1 million elements and can be run overnight. In recent tests, SGI with ESI Group successfully ran a model of 9.1 million elements at 338.20 gigaflops per second performance on a SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 server with 512GB memory running PAM-CRASH 2004 on 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors.

On the high-density Altix system, SGI and ESI Group were able to deliver the crash case results on model with 9.1 million elements, 8x that of a typical model, within 8 hours 11 minutes, enabling engineers to use the results of the full case computation with increased precision as early as the next morning. This means that an engineer can run a model eight times more complicated within essentially the same time as a standard sized model.

This outstanding result is made possible with a complement of the SGI Altix NUMAflex architecture with huge globally addressable shared-memory and PAM-CRASH software's enhanced scalability. The solution enables engineers to cope with the expected growth of model size due to factors like model refinement, increase model fidelity, and modeling material rupture. Additionally, insurance companies rely on simulations to evaluate risks, including specific car-to-car and car-to-passenger interactions. With such a configuration car manufacturers can now address new applications such as the simulation of a detailed car body with trim, or investigate critical zones for rupture prediction.

"While high-performance computing hardware has moved toward scalable systems, ESI Group has invested in a new architecture for its crash test solution solver," said Vincent Chaillou, President and Chief Operating Officer, Product Operations, ESI Group. "The new generation of our parallel solver, first delivered in 2002, offers unprecedented scalability for full car model computations."

"The Altix server family offers tremendous flexibility in configuring for application-specific needs," said Christian Tanasescu, Director of Engineering, Simulation Applications, SGI. "Altix can be used in single system image configurations up to 512 processors or as a supercluster that equips up to 2,048 processors with globally addressable memory. With an industry-leading communication latency of less than 1 microsecond, SGI's NUMAflex interconnect enables PAM-CRASH to scale to dramatic new heights."

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About: ESI Group
ESI Group is the world leading software editor for the numerical simulation of prototype and manufacturing process engineering in applied mechanics. The key to ESI Group's success is the use of realistic material physics, providing "as good as real" virtual solutions, in order to replace the lengthy trial and error processes on real prototypes.

ESI Group has developed an entire suite of coherent industry-oriented applications to realistically simulate a product's behavior during testing, to fine tune the manufacturing processes in synergy with the desired product performance, and to evaluate the environment's impact on product usage. ESI Group's product portfolio, which has been industrially validated and combined in multi-trade value chains, represents a unique collaborative, virtual engineering solution, known as the Virtual Try-Out Space (VTOS), enabling a continuous improvement on the virtual prototype.

By drastically reducing costs and development lead times, VTOS solutions offer major competitive advantages by progressively eliminating the need for physical prototypes.

A sustained growth

Total consolidated revenue for fiscal year 2003, ending January 31st 2004, increased by 15% in real terms and 22% at constant exchange rates, compared to the previous year reaching 49 million euro.

The software activity remained stable with 73% from licenses and 27% from services.

The major acquisitions made in 2002 and 2003 accounted for 15% of revenue growth and took part in the strengthening of the Group's position on the American market.

As in previous years, ESI Group maintained a strong international presence with 50% of turnover generated outside Europe and 79% of revenue outside.

Listed on the Nouveau Marché of Euronext Paris, ESI Group employs almost 500 high-level specialists worldwide.
ESI Group and its global network of agents provide sales and technical support to customers in more than 30 countries.

A key investment area: Research and Development

ESI Group is making substantial R&D efforts and forms partnerships with leading academic and research laboratories in order to offer state-of-the-art solutions.

ESI Group also provides high value-added services, worldwide through its subsidiaries located in Europe, Asia and Americas. Consulting projects with strategic industrial partners as well as European R&D contracts exemplify ESI Group's strong engineering knowledge and scientific expertise.

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