Fujitsu is supplying Turkey’s biggest car maker with its high performance computing (HPC) systems to keep the manufacturer ahead of the race.

It drives the car-maker by running algorithms that track all the variables of the volatile automobile market.

Bursa-based Tofaş makes 400,000 cars and commercial vehicles a year for brands like Fiat, Citroen, Peugeot, Opel and Vauxhall.

Juggling the costs of materials, scheduling time slots for production, recruiting specialized staff and dealing with demand variables (such as price elasticity, colours, styles and features), then rationalizing them to Computer Aided Design, is the work only a supercomputer can do, according to Tofas.

Fujitsu’s HPC solution will comprise of Fujitsu Primecenter, Primergy and Eternus systems plus consultancy and services.

The Tofaş research and development team will be able to expand and develop the system as their analyses becomes more complex in future.

The contract award follows a request for proposal (RFP) process during which Tofaş asked each vendor to run benchmarks with the same input files on their demo system and to provide output files and benchmark reports.

According to Fujitsu, its results were significantly ahead of the closest competitor.

“We selected Fujitsu for a variety of reasons – not the least of which is the speed and performance of the hardware,” said Hakan Korkmaz, Tofas’s information and communication technologies director.

“It was also the most knowledgeable about high performance computing.”

An HPC system is the ideal number cruncher for big data, said Cameron McNaught, Fujitsu’s executive VP of solutions.

“HPC’s processing power and modeling can speed up development by analyzing multiple sources of big data and customers’ buying behavior,” McNaught said.

Fujitsu HPC architectures range from x86 Celcius high-end workstations, through x86 Primergy industry-standard servers to the Primehp FX10 supercomputer.