Japan Boosts Railway Simulation Capability

The Railway Technical Research Institute (RTRI) in Japan has added more muscle to its supercomputer infrastructure for complex railway simulations. The organization, which focuses on research and development of railway-related science and technology, has deployed a Cray XC30-AC supercomputer, Cray CS300 cluster supercomputer, and a Cray Sonexion storage system into production.

The RTRI’s research spans everything from earthquake cluster prediction to improving the fatigue strength of wheel/axle fittings. The group operates a number of facilities, including a rolling stock test plant; brake test stands that allow for tests up to 500 km/h; a large-scale shaking table to simulate earthquake motion; a station simulator to test passenger flows and thermal/acoustic environments; a rainfall simulator; and a large-scale wind tunnel.

The XC30-AC is the institute’s primary high performance computing system, and will be used to run advanced simulations. The CS300, meanwhile, is used as a general-purpose application server.

The RTRI system has a peak performance of more than 100 teraflops. The Sonexion system includes 220TB of capacity and 10GB per-second of application horsepower.

Source: Cray