Justin, **OT** Wonder why they're not going with NT?
UltraSPARCs Help GM Drive New Car Designs:
To design its cars, the world's largest automaker, General Motors Corp., relies heavily on Sun Microsystems workstations and servers. Moreover, that reliance is increasing as GM completes the internal deployment of math-based design technology and begins extending it to its thousands of
suppliers of systems, components, and tooling.
GM is stepping up its buying of Sun workstations, according to Kirk Gutmann, product development information officer in GM's Information Technology organization. GM already has over 5,000 SPARC workstations and 150 Enterprise-class servers installed in its product design operations.
About 7,000 of the 10,000 engineering workstations in GM's vehicle design operations are now using Unigraphics from Unigraphics Solutions. About 5,000 of these systems are running on Sun UltraSPARC and SPARC2 machines. GM currently configures these new machines with up to one gigabyte (GB) of RAM and with a minimum of 750 MB.
Machines this powerful enable GM designers and engineers to assemble an entire car electronically. The math-based model allows checking for tolerance problems and interferences between parts when changes are quick and easy--before tooling is ordered.
Equally important, GM is working more and more with teams of designers, internal and external, and with systems of parts rather than individual components. "All this has to be pulled together in the computers to be understood and analyzed," Gutmann points out. Additional demands for workstation size stem from GM's use of
increasingly detailed tolerances.
Powerful workstations are also required for product data management (PDM), which GM is starting to implement. In PDM, sharing and importing the entire digital model grows ever more important. As a result, "these workstations now have to run a lot more applications," Gutmann notes.
Standardization on math-based design--years in the making--is also driving the demand for servers. As of the end of 1997, there were about 150 Enterprise E4000 and E6000 servers installed in GM's mechanical design operations. Most of these machines have 12 to 16 CPUs. For use as PDM data vaults, GM is evaluating Sun's Enterprise 10000-class servers, which can have up to 64 CPUs.
Why Sun?, Gutmann remarks, "GM is accelerating its move to math-based design. This is accelerating the move to networks, workstations, and their support. This means we have to get away from the mismatch of systems. Right now, Sun is getting the majority of this business. Sun," he continues, "is starting to understand the technical requirements we have for manufacturing and product engineering. We get better graphics response speed and UG takes good advantage of the software graphics drivers."
GM also likes Sun's newest RISC-based CPUs. "The clock speeds of the new UltraSPARC chips are very good," Gutmann says, "and Sun has come way up in floating-point processor speed."
The core of math-based design at GM is Unigraphics, a high-end mechanical CAD/ CAM system. Installation of Unigraphics Version 13 began in January 1998. The 7,000 UG seats at GM are about 70% of the total in product design.
Most of the other engineers still use GM's proprietary Corporate Graphics Systems (CGS). CGS was a pioneer in computer graphics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "The first goal is to get the remaining 3,000 product designers off CGS and onto Unigraphics as soon as possible," says Gutmann.
"Simultaneously we are accelerating UG deployment to our tooling and parts suppliers," he continues. "We cannot reduce new-car development time--a fundamental GM goal--without shrinking lead times of tooling." Math-based design helps tooling suppliers get started sooner. Moreover, because the data is always current, the risks of last-minute rework are minimized. GM calls this part of the business the Common Math Pipeline.
GM's rationale for math-based design is straight-forward. It helps everyone in product development stay on the same page. It supports today's high-quality levels and tomorrow's, which will be higher. It fosters a common set of objectives and a common language between GM employees and the suppliers. And, because the math-based model touches everything from product design to machine tool programming, it is the engine of concurrent engineering.
The decision to rely on Sun, Gutmann says, was based on the price/performance of the overall workstation, response time, performance of the base CPU, the ability to configure systems to GM's requirements, and graphics that meet GM's needs. Also important were Sun's flexibility in business terms and in technology deployment, and its willingness to support GM systems no matter where or when installed. GM is also confident that Sun will continue to upgrade its systems in line with GM's and UG's demands.
"The main component of the solution is that UG software has been optimized for SPARC workstations," Gutmann says. "For servers, the main issues are response time and scalability. The biggest concern for engineers using math-based design is response time. For both workstations and servers, the math model places much greater response-time demands on computer systems than we did in the past."
The biggest benefit of a Sun environment is simplified operations. "This reduces our operating costs for support and maintenance and allows us to do a better job for GM more cost effectively," Gutmann says. "Sun has been one of the key players in this. Altogether, we think using Sun and UG are having a positive effect on
shrinking the cycle time to develop a new car."
Company: General Motors Corp. Software: Unigraphics from Unigraphics Solutions. Hardware: Sun Sparc workstations and Enterprise
10000-class servers.
--Edited by BMS
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