Pulling the logistics of a F1 team together is more than just 'nuts and bolts'. Getting a successful race-car onto the track involves many hours of driver practice, engine tuning and tweaking, suspension and fuel adjustments -- but also pouring over mega bytes of data fed into high performance computers.
As a guest of Dell and the Lotus F1 Team the Carsales Network was on hand to gain some insight into the secretive tech world behind one of the most money laden sports on the planet. The truth is somewhat surprising; despite the cloak and dagger tactics and the lucullan lifestyles, the fact is that many teams share technology, but this is also done to save dollars.
Teams share trackside resources such as data communication links back to European home bases and the common AtlasF1 software. AtlasF1 is the system that collects mountains of data from the upwards of 300 sensors and Engine Control Unit (ECU) equipment aboard a F1 race car.
Speaking to Team Lotus' IT boss Antony Smith, it is clear that new F1 regulations limiting personal trackside for the 2011 season has had a marked effect on how race data is collected and analysed.
The data arriving from the ECU and sensors is somewhat daunting; 20 to 30 Megabytes (a MB being approximately one million bytes) just in firing up the car, 150 MB per test run and upwards of 5 Gigabytes (a GB is 1000 MBs).
A common movie DVD holds around this much information, but remember, the telemetry coming from a vehicle is purely numbers (not video) delivered from sensors measuring suspension and gearbox positions, tyre status, wheel speeds and much more. All this data needs to be analysed as quickly as possible in order to help get the car set-up right on the day. Data is stored aboard the F1 car in a SSD (Solid State Drive) unit, normal hard drives being incapable of operation in such a harsh environment. Data is also beamed back wirelessly to pit crews during practice sessions
Dell is the chosen supplier of computing technology within Team Lotus. In a sport where time is precious, Bill Peters, Head of IT at Team Lotus, was given a matter of months to build the IT Infrastructure needed to run a competitive racing team. Peters says: "We found out quite late on that we'd been accepted into the 2010 F1 season, and had less than 22 weeks to build everything from scratch -- including a high performance computing (HPC) cluster, network and trackside infrastructures, a design environment and storage. I knew we needed a tier-one IT partner to work with us at every stage."
Trackside data is pumped back to the Dell cluster in the UK across a 4MB MPLS link, crunched by the virtualised blade servers (running VMWARE's VSphere 4) with results sent back to the race team in time for the next training session or as part of the process looking forward to the next race.
Also trackside, with the latest blade servers and laptops from Dell, the team's overall IT footprint is half that of most competitors. This means it saves space when travelling long haul -- space that can be used for spare car parts and other necessities. Peters explains: "On race day, we're entirely reliant on our trackside IT environment. Quite simply, if our IT fails, we can't race. We need excellent communications within the team, plus a lot of storage capacity and powerful systems to handle our data."
Smith explains that along with processing power, storage capacity is equally important to the IT systems. Real-time data is sampled 1000 times a second and logged on-board the cars' solid-state drive systems, as well as transmitted back to the teams computers.
Team Lotus utilise a 1 Terrabyte SAN (Storage Array Network) running SSD drives for efficient speed driving the Windows 2008 R2 virtual machines. There is also a lower tier of storage, on standard hard drives, amassing 10 TBs for storage of the actual race data. At the end of the GP this data is transmitted back to base to add to the overall Lotus database aiding planning for upcoming GP's.
While Heikki Kovalainen and Jarno Trulli battle it out for a place on the track, Team Lotus's IT team of system engineers work to squeeze maximum efficiency from the machinery as the F1 circus rolls along.
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