General Motors Enhances Vehicle Development Process with Industry's Fastest Supercomputer

IBM System to Significantly Increase Computing Capacity

DETROIT, MI, April 21, 2004 -- General Motors announced today that it purchased the automotive industry's fastest supercomputer from IBM. GM's newest supercomputer, based on IBM's POWER4 technology, allows greater global collaboration, improved validation testing and, ultimately, reduced product- development costs.

"The automobile industry is increasingly reliant upon computers to develop and test vehicles. Our state-of-the-art computing platform allows us to shorten the time it takes to bring a vehicle to market from 48 to 18 months for some vehicles and significantly reduce structural costs in the process," said Jim Queen, vice president, GM North America Engineering. "Thanks to high performance computing GM can move faster, introduce more new vehicles and keep pace with changing consumer preferences."

GM's newest supercomputer more than doubles its high performance computing capacity, again placing it as the automotive industry's fastest machine by a wide margin. The level of compute power delivered by the new machine carries the equivalent of doing one calculation per second on a calculator for more than 285,000 years.

"IBM's leadership in high-performance computing, coupled with its deep automotive industry expertise, makes it a perfect partner for General Motors as it further improves its capabilities as a real-time company and better positions itself to meet customer demand, adjust to market forces and grow," said Frank Roney, Managing Director, IBM General Motors Global Account. "IBM's understanding of its customer's needs complements GM's strengths as an innovator and industry technology leader."

Design modifications and engineering issues that once took months or weeks to resolve can now be handled in minutes or hours. Over the past 10 years, crash simulation has become the largest user of high-performance computer resources at GM, helping to lower vehicle production costs by cutting down the number of costly, full-size crash models that need to be built as digital computer simulations do much of the work.

"High performance computing and technology innovation have played critical roles in GM's 'Go-Fast' culture, affecting virtually every facet of what we do," said Terry Kline, GM Global Product Development Process Information Officer. "This increased computer capacity from IBM will enable better decisions about vehicle designs and material specifications, ultimately leading to higher quality and superior performing vehicles."

The following are examples of recent high performance computing work within GM:

Innovative New Products -- Thanks to high-performance computing, GM can develop new, low-cost vehicle architectures faster than ever before. When the call came out to turn the Pontiac Solstice concept into a reality, GM created the new Kappa platform and the Pontiac Solstice in record time and at a low cost by using GM's computing network. With a heavy reliance on digital design and validation, the team was able to shorten the time it would take to develop and test this important new product. They were able to deliver a completely new architecture and product in 27 months and at a price point of $20,000.

Global Collaboration and Product Development -- Creating products globally requires a high reliance on computing resources and virtual collaboration tools. The GTO team, working with the engineering and manufacturing staff at Holden Ltd. in Australia, benefited from GM's ability to share large data files between the 16 global engineering centers. This allowed the engineering team to conduct work in both Michigan and Australia seamlessly.

Increased Cost Savings -- The increased use and reliance on digital testing has allowed GM to eliminate a large part of the cost of building and testing vehicles. By relying upon virtual crash tests, GM has been able to reduce the number of crash vehicles needed by more than 85%. At a cost of $500,000 per vehicle crash test, this adds up to significant savings.

IBM won the GM contract based upon product performance, physical packaging and its commitment to deliver additional capacity in 2004 to meet GM's rising engineering and analytical demands. With this deal IBM becomes the major supplier of supercomputers to GM worldwide and establishes its technology as a global standard for high performance computing.

About GM:

General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM), the world's largest vehicle manufacturer, employs about 325,000 people globally. Founded in 1908, GM has been the global automotive sales leader since 1931. GM today has manufacturing operations in 32 countries and its vehicles are sold in 192 countries. More information on GM and its products can be found on the company's corporate website at http://www.gm.com . GM's automotive brands are Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, HUMMER, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Saab and Saturn. GM's OnStar is the industry leader in vehicle safety, security and information services.

In 2003, GM again set industry sales records in the United States, its largest market, for total trucks and sport utility vehicles. GM became the first manufacturer to sell more than 2.8 million trucks in a calendar year and the first to sell more than 1.3 million SUVs. GM also remained the industry leader in total sales of cars and total sales of full-size pickup trucks. In 2003, GM sold nearly 8.6 million cars and trucks, about 15 percent of the global vehicle market. GM's global headquarters are at the GM Renaissance Center in Detroit.

About IBM:

IBM is the leading provider of supercomputing power worldwide, with over 188 Teraflops of power (trillions of calculations per second) on the TOP500 List of Supercomputers. This represents more than 35.5 percent of the total processing power on the list. IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with more than 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com .

SOURCE General Motors Corporation

Web Site: http://media.gm.com

http://www.gm.com

http://www.ibm.com