Can BMW’s new supercomputer help win F1 races?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 15 December 2006 01:05

IT Industry - Market

BMW’s Sauber F1 Team has a new ally in the battle to win F1 races – a supercomputer called ‘Albert2’.

So, what can Albert2 do? Is he alive like Number 5? Well… a supercomputer he may be, but there’s no sign of sentient thought just yet.

Albert2 is designed to do ‘computational fluid dynamics’ or CFD, and he does it three times faster than his predecessor Albert. Of course we’re assuming that Albert2 is a fellow, because there aren’t many female computers around, and none of them are called Albert, although we are sure there must be an Alberta or two around somewhere.

Launched on Thursday to the world press, it’s the fastest supercomputer in the industry, it has been designed to help with the car’s aerodynamics, and is BMW Sauber’s attempt at focusing on computing power, rather than building a second physical wind tunnel as other teams are doing.

According to BMW Motorsport Director Mario Thissen: "Aerodynamics has a crucial influence on the performance of modern Formula 1 cars, with experimental work in the wind tunnel and computational fluid dynamics complementing each other. The launch of Albert2 means a decisive reinforcement of our CFD capacity”.

"Unlike other teams, we are not planning to build a second wind tunnel but will continue to bank on the consistently expanding potential in this area. 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."

Albert2 is using the latest dual core Intel Xeon processors in a cluster, with the move to multi-core credited with being able to meet BMW Sauber’s computing power needs now and into the future.

There are 256 nodes with two Intel Xeon 5160 processors each, for a total of 1024 cores. Over 2000 gigabytes of memory (2048 to be exact) is installed, giving a maximum computing power of 12.288 teraflops.

While Albert2 is on average 3 times faster than the predecessor Albert using a program known as ‘Fluent’, a ‘Linpack’ Benchmark clocks the system at 5.5 faster.

More details are available at the HPC website.