Linux Powers Billion-Cell Analysis

An Italian supercomputer running ANSYS performed a one-billion-cell analysis of an unnamed America's Cup yacht, breaking the previous record for largest finite element analysis. 

The super computer: an HP Cluster Platform 3000BL running Linux, consisting of 208 server blades, each with an Intel Xeon quad-core CPU. Total peak performance was nearly 22 teraflops (22 thousand billion floating point operations) per second.

The task: the aerodynamic impact of wind on the racing yacht's mainsail and asymmetrical spinnaker sailing downwind. 

Despite running on the 135th most powerful computer in the world, the duration for the analysis isn't realtime: it took 170 hours of continuous computing (one week). Works out to 1,634 cells per second.

Ansys has images of the analyses here.