IT upgrade accelerates product development
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Corus Automotive product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
May 13, 2005
Corus Automotive Engineering has upgraded its IT systems, boosting its advanced computing capacity and throughput by a factor of five.
Following significant investment, Corus Automotive Engineering, part of the technology function of the international metals company, has announced the successful upgrading of its IT systems, which has boosted its advanced computing capacity and throughput by a factor of five.
The use of computer aided engineering (CAE) as a tool to help reduce the cost and time of new product development is now standard practice within the automotive industry.
However, there is a growing need from the industry for more detailed and complex analysis models.
The upgrade at Corus Automotive Engineering, based in Coventry, will ensure that the company is able to meet this growing demand, while further extending the capabilities and possibilities of its CAE modelling.
Commenting on the upgrade, Jon King, Director Corus Automotive Engineering said: "We specialise in developing innovative vehicle engineering solutions using latest thinking in materials and manufacturing technologies, and CAE plays an important part in this".
"This upgrade enables us to improve the support we provide within Corus businesses to help them make the best use of their materials, allowing them to offer their automotive customers tailored solutions to issues such as safety, weight and cost".
The upgrade at Corus Automotive Engineering has involved several stages.
Working with Hawke Systems, a specialist in infrastructure systems and storage upgrades and HP, one of the world's largest IT companies, Corus has invested in new state-of-the-art hardware, which has increased computing storage capacity to 10Tbyte, equivalent to the capacity of over 200 high quality desktop PCs and added a further 24 twin processor high performance servers to support the simulation demands.
In parallel, the backup and archiving systems, both important elements to efficient running of the IT system, have also been upgraded.
A disc to disc to tape system was installed, which dramatically reduces the time required for backups and recovery and enables transfers to tape, for added security, to be done as an offline activity.
A key element of the upgrade has been the installation of job management software that will allow transparent access to the computing resources by Corus engineers and enable the optimum use of all resource across the group.
The GX Synergy "grid" system installed by specialist French software company GridXpert, has removed job submission bottlenecks and increased the available calculation capacity by a factor of four, which ultimately will improve the productivity of research Corus engineers are able to undertake and the sharing of knowledge between different users.
Mike Twelves, Manager Knowledge Systems at Corus Automotive Engineering commented: "The GX Synergy grid, which runs twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, will allow us to run a much larger number of iterations and calculations as it identifies, prioritises and makes use of available computing resource".
"Importantly, this will improve the efficiency and speed of our simulation work helping us to further reduce new product development time".
The use of ground breaking computer simulation modelling techniques by Corus Automotive Engineering has recently helped the company's Tubes business, based in Corby, to develop a new roadside safety system that meets the latest European EN1317 standard for the containment of vehicles and is expected to help improve road safety in crash situations.
Commenting on how the upgrade will further help drive development of new products, Bill Russell, Product Manufacturing Manager Corus Tubes said: "Without CAE modelling, it would have been prohibitively time consuming and expensive to rely on traditional testing to develop our new roadside safety system".
"The increased computing capability at Corus Automotive Engineering can only further improve the process, speed, efficiency and accuracy of new product development especially for more complex model analysis, needed to produce optimised designs on time".
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