Tokyo, October 24, 2017

Fujitsu announced that it has provided the Japan Automobile Research Institute (JARI) with an x86 cluster that uses a liquid immersion cooling system, as a new computational system to simulate automobile collisions. JARI conducts research into areas such as the safety of passengers and pedestrians, vehicle collisions and the mechanisms of injuries, using both simulations and real world experiments using actual vehicles and human body dummies. Computer simulations can provide more information than physical experiments on dummies and they can contribute significantly to automobile safety research. Therefore, JARI decided to adopt Fujitsu’s cluster system with its liquid immersion cooling system.

This cluster system uses 16 PRIMERGY CX2550 M2 x86 servers in PRIMERGY CX400 M1 chassis, each of which features two Intel Xeon E5-2643 v4 (3.4GHz) processors (a total of 32 CPUs and 192 cores), as its computational servers, with a PRIMERGY RX2530 M2 server as a management server.

Such a battery of servers is prone to heating and usually requires a conventional air cooling systems which use a lot of power and space. However the Fujitsu system can be cooled by immersing the servers in a non-conductive fluid.

By eliminating the need for cooling fans within each server and air conditioning equipment for the server room, while also enabling the water temperature in water cooling equipment to be increased, this system can be expected to reduce power consumption by about 40 per cent. It can also reduce the facilities cost by rendering air conditioning equipment and thermal insulation unnecessary. The system can be installed practically anywhere, since it’s not necessary to consider air quality issues, like humidity, salinity and dust that must be taken into account when installing conventional servers

This system runs software like Fujitsu Technical Computing Solution LS-DYNA, which performs nonlinear structural dynamic analysis, a simulation used for analysis of physical events such as collisions, impacts, falls, plastic processing and piercing, tearing and other destruction. It is currently in use at JARI, and is being used to develop elaborate and realistic models of the human body, enabling the simulation of large-scale collisions at greater levels of energy saving. JARI will provide simulation results and the human body models developed using this system to the automobile industry.