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Albert: Sauber's F1 supercomputer Wind Tunnel: The comparatively
real-life testing of the wind tunnel goes hand in hand with research and
development carried out by Albert, Sauber's new supercomputer, which is
housed at the same plant and named after a rather well-known Swiss
scientific genius. Albert's specialist subject is CFD, or Computational
Fluid Dynamics. This is the science of predicting how even the smallest
changes in component shape, placement or movement will affect the
overall flow of air or fluids.
Building the big picture of how an F1 cars components all interact with
each other in terms of airflow is a mind-bendingly complex process. It
starts with CAD modelling, to generate several million tiny triangles
arranged in a mesh to represent the car itself. This expands to hundreds
of millions of triangles when you factor in the all-important air
movement around the car, which needs to be built into the equation. To
get a grip on airflow analysis, Albert is 30 times more powerful than
Sauber's previous supercomputer and a leader in the F1 field. Built by
DALCO at a cost of around $3 million(UK), the supercomputer uses 530 AMD
Opteron processors and runs Fluent CFD software on the Linux platform.
The 64-bit AMD Opteron was chosen for its Direct Connect Architecture,
and the fact that it includes onboard memory controllers to
significantly reduce latency, while enabling the fastest data throughput
from chip to chip and from chip to I/O, using HyperTransport technology.
It's parallel computing par excellence. Using Albert, designers can
build and test hundreds of components and complete cars in the virtual
realm, even seeing how tyre temperatures and hot exhaust gases affect
the aero package. They can then channel their resources into building
only the most promising parts for real testing in the wind tunnel and on
track.
Weighing in at 18 tons, the 10-rack supercomputer consumes 150kW of
power. A special water-cooling system was developed by American
experts,APC, to stop Albert getting too hot under the collar while
carrying out its 2,332 billion computing operations per second, backed
up by 1,085,440MB of physical memory and 10,880GB of hard drive storage
space. Sauber says that to achieve the same computing performance that
Albert accomplishes in one second, the entire population of Zurich would
have to multiply two eight-digit numbers every second for a whole year.
Full Article: PCANSWERS Magazine March 2005
Albert: Sauber's F1 supercomputer Wind Tunnel: The comparatively
real-life testing of the wind tunnel goes hand in hand with research and
development carried out by Albert, Sauber's new supercomputer, which is
housed at the same plant and named after a rather well-known Swiss
scientific genius. Albert's specialist subject is CFD, or Computational
Fluid Dynamics. This is the science of predicting how even the smallest
changes in component shape, placement or movement will affect the
overall flow of air or fluids.
Building the big picture of how an F1 cars components all interact with
each other in terms of airflow is a mind-bendingly complex process. It
starts with CAD modelling, to generate several million tiny triangles
arranged in a mesh to represent the car itself. This expands to hundreds
of millions of triangles when you factor in the all-important air
movement around the car, which needs to be built into the equation. To
get a grip on airflow analysis, Albert is 30 times more powerful than
Sauber's previous supercomputer and a leader in the F1 field. Built by
DALCO at a cost of around $3 million(UK), the supercomputer uses 530 AMD
Opteron processors and runs Fluent CFD software on the Linux platform.
The 64-bit AMD Opteron was chosen for its Direct Connect Architecture,
and the fact that it includes onboard memory controllers to
significantly reduce latency, while enabling the fastest data throughput
from chip to chip and from chip to I/O, using HyperTransport technology.
It's parallel computing par excellence. Using Albert, designers can
build and test hundreds of components and complete cars in the virtual
realm, even seeing how tyre temperatures and hot exhaust gases affect
the aero package. They can then channel their resources into building
only the most promising parts for real testing in the wind tunnel and on
track.
Weighing in at 18 tons, the 10-rack supercomputer consumes 150kW of
power. A special water-cooling system was developed by American
experts,APC, to stop Albert getting too hot under the collar while
carrying out its 2,332 billion computing operations per second, backed
up by 1,085,440MB of physical memory and 10,880GB of hard drive storage
space. Sauber says that to achieve the same computing performance that
Albert accomplishes in one second, the entire population of Zurich would
have to multiply two eight-digit numbers every second for a whole year.
Full Article: PCANSWERS Magazine March 2005
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