F1 BMW Sauber Launches New Supercomputer

BMW Sauber this morning revealed a new supercomputer with mind-blowing capabilities to help the team develop better Formula 1 cars. The computer, known as Albert2, can complete 12.288 TeraFlops, which enables the team to get five times the performance of the previous computer - itself only a couple of years old - for only twice the power. It is Europe's fastest machine used in industry according to the current Top500. To illustrate the point for non-computer-experts, this means that Albert2 is capable of performing 12,288,000,000,000 floating-point arithmetic operations per second. To equal this computing power, all the inhabitants of the city of Munich (1.3 million) would have to multiply two eight-digit numbers every three and a half seconds for an entire year. Albert2 is based on Intel processors and employed by the team for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). "In Formula 1 we use computers for almost everything," says the team's head of aerodynamics Willem Toet. "The whole world is changing over to mathematical simulation. F1 is no exception and we use it in every area we can think of. I don't expect we can ever give up wind tunnel testing but then unlike some other teams we don't expect we'd need to build another windtunnel. We do additional testing using mathematical simulations. This is one of the very best windtunnels on the planet. We are able to use a full scale car, we can move the model up and down, pitch it, roll it yaw it, move the wheels, simulate crosswinds but there is still a huge amount we cannot do. We cannot simulate true cornering, sliding dynamically the angle of the air is different at different points on the car. We cannot simulate true distortion of tyres in a corner. With computational fluid dynamics we can do these things. For the new season, we have set the goal of further reducing the gap to the top. Our new Supercomputer based on Intel technology is an important tool supporting us in this effort. " "The powerful Dual-Core Xeon processors perfectly match the high demand on computing power of the BMW Sauber F1 Team. The cluster based on these processors is one of the fastest in the world running computational fluid dynamic applications, "said Christian Morales, Vice President & General Manager of Intel Europe, Middle East and Africa. "With the move to Multi-Core we are able to meet the future demand on computing power of the BMW Sauber F1 Team for computational fluid dynamics. " Albert2 is based on Intel technology. It has 256 nodes with two Intel's Woodcrest Xeon 5160 processors each, and each of these has dual-cores. This results in a total of 1024 cores. The capacity of the main memory is 2,048 Gbyte. According to the criteria defined for acceptance in the Top-500 list of Supercomputers, this data makes Albert2 5.5 times faster than its predecessor, Albert. In the field, as with any computer, the software used plays a crucial part when it comes to speed. But even when running the complex programs for CFD calculations the increase is immense: when using the Fluent application, the average performance improvement amounts to a factor of three. The architecture of the Supercomputer was developed by the Swiss company DALCO. A key objective was the achievement of high levels of efficiency as well as very good scalability, meaning that operations can be split among many processors without any significant loss of performance. The software for the CFD calculations is supplied by the German subsidiary of the American company Fluent, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of ANSYS, Inc. since May 2006. Their specialists have been working together with the CFD engineers in Hinwil for several years, optimising the software step by step. Dalco also revealed that the Intel processors are hot swappable. Franklin Dallman, VP of marketing at Dalco, said that Intel Quad core processors remain pin compatible with the motherboards used. And, because of the way the whole machine is built, it is feasible to hot swap all of the processors. The Intel processors operate inside High Density Racks from American Power Conversion (APC). These combine power supply, cooling and environmental monitoring in an optimised rack construction. The Supercomputer consists of a total of ten racks, each having a width of one metre, a depth of 1.20 metres and a height of 2.30 metres. This results in a total length of nine metres and a total weight of 21 tons. Albert2's enormous technological potential is used for analyses in the area of aerodynamics. By means of CFD aerodynamics components for Formula 1 cars are calculated on the computer, using numerical grid models that often consist of more than 100 million cells. CFD plays an important part in the development of front, rear and auxiliary wings as well as engine and brake cooling as another key area. For the CFD specialists, the computing power provided by Albert² means that they can perform their calculations either at higher speed or greater accuracy. Willem Toet, Head of Aerodynamics for the BMW Sauber F1 Team, says: "Thanks to Albert2 we can calculate more variants and more complex models which, in the end, results in an advantage on the stop watch. Of particular benefit is the system's good scalability which gives us a very high level of flexibility. " Computational fluid dynamics does not compete with the work in the wind tunnel but complements it. During the development of the front wing, for example, numerous variants are calculated using CFD before the most promising of them are tested on the 60-percent model in the wind tunnel. "A major advantage of CFD is the ability to simulate the air flow, which enables us to understand why one part is better than another. Consequently, there is a crossfertilization between simulation and experimental aerodynamics, " Toet added.