Engineers reviewing large-scale simulation data on a wall of screens (Credit: NASA/Advanced Supercomputing Division/Dominic Hart)
SUBTOPIC

Automotive & Mobility

Crashing 45 million finite elements together, thousands of times, so no one has to crash a real car unnecessarily.

Image: NASA/Advanced Supercomputing Division/Dominic Hart

From Finite Elements to Certified Safety

Crash-test simulation tracks the physical stresses on tens of millions of finite elements across the milliseconds of a collision — a scale of detail comparable to real vehicle crash models. Combined with multi-body dynamics for suspension and autonomous-driving perception training on synthetic sensor data, automotive HPC workloads span structural mechanics, CFD, and AI in a single simulation pipeline. Malgukke builds the scalable simulation concepts that let manufacturers iterate designs digitally before a single physical prototype is built.

HPC Solution Architecture: Design to Crash Certification

A multi-physics automotive simulation pipeline, as run at HLRS for the Automotive Simulation Center Stuttgart:

Vehicle CAD Body-in-white, chassis model Simulation Core CPU Nodes Crash finite-element solver GPU Nodes AV perception training Impact & Stress Deformation analysis Digital Twin Sync with physical test data Safety Certification & homologation Certified physical crash tests validate and refine the digital model for the next design cycle

Running on the TOP500: Hunter

TOP500 — JUNE 2025 LIST

Hunter is ranked No. 53 on the June 2025 TOP500 list with 48.1 petaflops of theoretical peak performance, built on AMD Instinct MI300A accelerated processing units at HLRS in Stuttgart. HLRS serves the Automotive Simulation Center Stuttgart (ASCS), a consortium founded in 2008 by Porsche, Daimler, Opel, and HLRS itself to develop next-generation crash, CFD, and structural-mechanics simulation software for the automotive industry — the exact workloads described on this page.

Yes — this is a real, currently operating TOP500-ranked system, directly used by German automakers and suppliers through the ASCS consortium for the automotive simulation workloads described here.

#53
Global TOP500 Rank
48.1
Petaflop/s (peak)

Voices from the Field

Prof. Michael Resch

Director, HLRS High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart

On why the fusion of HPC, AI, and sustainability is transforming supercomputing for automotive and industrial engineering.

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Automotive Simulation Center Stuttgart

Joint industry-research consortium, HLRS

On 10 years of Porsche, Daimler, and HLRS collaboration developing simulation software that keeps pace with doubling core counts.

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