Case Study: BMW Group pushes FEM limits with MSC Software and IBM

BMW Group - Customer Case Study

BMW Group wanted to test how far finite element method (FEM) analysis could scale as model sizes kept growing in automotive engineering. Using a BMW X3 body-in-white as the basis, the company benchmarked its “Model of the Day After Tomorrow” on standard hardware and software, working with MSC Software and MD Nastran to identify future bottlenecks in large-scale simulation.

MSC Software and IBM supported the benchmark with MD Nastran on an IBM p5-595 system, using out-of-core capabilities, an iterative PCGLSS solver, and memory/I/O tuning to handle the enormous model. The analysis completed in 22 hours and 17 minutes with 95% CPU utilization, processing a 911 million DOF model that generated 7.8 TB of disk I/O and about 300 GB of total memory use, proving the approach could run extremely large FEM problems on standard platforms.

BMW Group

Daniel Heiserer

Group Member