* The Eurocopter Group chose a Linux Networx Evolocity cluster to perform simulations on helicopters and helicopter subsystems
Linux Networx, a Linux cluster vendor, announced last week that The Eurocopter Group has installed one of its clusters at its German engineering location to allow them to more efficiently manipulate data necessary for the design of their helicopters.
The company, part of the European, Aeronautic and Space Defense Company (EADS) also makes AIRBUS airplanes. Eurocopter chose a Linux Networx Evolocity cluster to perform simulations on helicopters and helicopter subsystems. It uses two computational fluid dynamics applications – FLOWer and FLUENT – to simulate airflow scenarios: http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/servers/2004/0927server2.html?rl
“We are doing design studies on our helicopters for our rotors,” says Dr. Andree Altmikus, aerodynamic design engineer for Eurocopter Deutschland.
Altmikus had a 5-year-old machine that needed replacing. Eurocopter was open to any machine that employed a shared memory architecture.
“Our objective was to find a machine that was roughly 10 times faster than the old one,” he says. “We found out very fast that the price/performance relationship was in favor of Linux clusters.”
Eurocopter’s Evolocity cluster consists of 20 dual-processor AMD Opteron 248 servers with a total of 160 G bytes of memory: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2004/1104linuxnet.html?rl
The Opteron 248 runs at 2.2 GHz. Each Opteron is joined with InfiniBand interconnects from Mellanox to increase the performance of the cluster. The cluster runs SuSE Linux.
Altmikus manages the cluster with Linux Networx Clusterworx and IceBox. The IceBox appliance combines a serial terminal server and remote-controlled power distribution for simplified cluster management.
Altmikus’ cluster has internal storage and is attached to about 2 terabytes of SCSI disks.
