BMW is now F1's fastest – at least in computer terms

Accelerating its quest to conquer Formula One, BMW has installed the highest 'revving' supercomputer in any F1 team -- and it will be 'driven' by an Australian.

Christened Albert², the computer can do 12,288 billion calculations a second. It is not only the most powerful in F1 but among the most powerful in any industry in Europe and will be used for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) which, along with wind tunnels, are used in analysing aerodynamics, one of the most crucial factors in F1.

With CFD, components of F1 cars can be designed and calculated on the computer using numerical grid models that consist of more than 100 million cells.

"It makes us more efficient and is a better way for the future than having another wind tunnel," says Willem Toet (pictured), head of aerodynamics for the BMW Sauber F1 team.

Toet was born in Amsterdam but is an Australian (he's from Frankston in Melbourne) and previously worked for Honda's F1 team, Ferrari during Michael Schumacher's early days, and Toleman -- which later became the Benetton team, and with which Schumacher won the first two of his seven world titles.

Brazilian Nelson Piquet won the second of his three world titles with a turbocharged BMW engine in his Brabham car in 1983, but the German manufacturer has never won the F1 constructors' championship. It returned to the world's premier motorsport competition in 2000 after 13 years out of the sport, but -- after Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher delivered several Grand Prix wins -- its marriage to the no-longer-great Williams team was dissolved and a year ago it took over Swiss team Sauber to run its F1 program entirely its way.

This year BMW Sauber finished fifth on the constructors' table, with 36 world championship points -- less than 20 per cent of Renault's 206 and Ferrari's 201, and less than half the 110 of McLaren, powered by BMW's arch-rival Mercedes, and Honda's 86.

BMW is now funding a new building at Hinwil in Switzerland that will link the Sauber factory and its wind tunnel, which is only a couple of years old and arguably the best in F1.

BMW's motorsport director Dr Mario Theissen said: "When we took over the team there were 275 employees. We have already reached 400, and by the end of next season we will have 430. We shifted the wind tunnel to two shifts in January, and since October we have been had three shifts working round the clock."

Now comes the new supercomputer, which is based on Intel processors and is up to 5.5 times faster than its predecessor, the original Albert. Albert1 used Opteron processors from Intel's competitor AMD and has been mothballed after just two years.

Intel vice-president Christian Morales says the new, more powerful processors "perfectly match" the F1 team's computing needs.

"The cluster based on these processors is one of the fastest in the world running CFD applications," Morales says.

CFD is important in the development of front, rear and auxiliary wings, and engine and brake cooling. During the development of a wing, many variants are calculated using CFD before the most promising are tested on a 60 per cent model of the car in a wind tunnel.

Albert² has 256 nodes each with two Intel Xeon 5160 Woodcrest processors developed in Israel, and each of these has two cores – making a total of 1024 cores.

The capacity of the main memory is 2048 Gbyte and the maximum computing power is 12,288 GFlops.

Albert²'s architecture was developed by Swiss company DALCO, the software for the CFD calculations is supplied by the German subsidiary of the American company Fluent (a wholly-owned subsidiary of ANSYS) and the Intel processors operate inside high-density racks from American Power Conversion (APC).

Albert² consists of 10 racks, each a 1.0m wide, 1.2m deep and 2.3m high, with an all-up weight of 21 tons.

The supercomputer's mega 'engine' will enable BMW Sauber's CFD specialists not only to do their calculations much faster but more accurately.

Says Toet: "Thanks to Albert² we can calculate more variants and more complex models which, in the end, results in an advantage on the stopwatch (in lap times). Of particular benefit is the system's good scalability, which gives us a very high level of flexibility.

"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 cross-fertilization between simulation and experimental aerodynamics," Toet said.