Date: 01/06/2014

White Paper

16X Speedup in Maxwell DSO on 32-Core High-Performance Compute Farm Doubles Traction Motor Design Productivity at General Motors

Optimizing the design of traction motors used to drive electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) is challenging because automakers have little experience in this area. Electromagnetic simulation plays a critical role by evaluating the performance of design concepts, such as by computing the torque profile of the machine. In the past, it took hundreds of hours to perform electromagnetic simulation on a single design iteration, which hurt productivity by leaving engineers waiting for results. General Motors (GM) developed a high-performance computing (HPC) environment using surplus hardware with a 32-core compute farm that provided a 16 timesx speedup on electromagnetic simulation, reducing solution time to less than five hours.