Extreme car design

The Advanced Design Center California, which serves as Mercedes-Benz’s North American R&D division, installed NVIDIA Maximus hardware on HP Z800 workstations to bolster the automotive OEM’s “extreme-car” design for the recent LA Auto Show Design Challenge. NVIDIA Maximus combines an NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics-processing unit (GPU) for high-end 3D graphics (in this case, the Quadro 6000) with the company’s new Tesla C2075 companion processor for heavy-duty number crunching. According to Mercedes, the technology transformed the studio’s workflow from a tedious, serial process to a parallel-processing setting that lets users perform 3D design, simulation, and visualization all at once and on the desktop.

“For Mercedes, this competition is a way to test new software and design technologies we might then apply to develop production cars,” says the studio’s chief designer, Christopher Rhoades. “Internally, it also demonstrates to Mercedes management in Germany the role and value of satellite design studios such as ours.”

In previous competitions, the design studio had used a quad-core CPU configured workstation. The design workflow began in 2D, went to 3D modeling, and finally on to visualization.

“Problem was, this approach forced designers to compromise, eliminating a lot of great features and dumbing things down because the studio’s computer wasn’t fast enough to perform high-end design and ray tracing (photorealistic rendering),” says Rhoades. “Ray tracing takes lots of calculations and can easily keep a computer busy for a day. The vehicle design entailed hundreds of frames per visualization, and each frame took 10 minutes to render, so we needed hundreds of hours of rendering time each week.” This almost completely monopolized the studio’s computers, so designers couldn’t do any other work while rendering took place.