SGI Supercomputing and Storage Solutions Help Drive Aerodynamic Improvements That Can Make the Difference Between Winning and Losing For Vodafone McLaren MercedesXF
Having won more than 150 Grands Prix, 11 drivers’ and eight constructors’ world titles, McLaren is one of the most successful teams in the history of Formula 1. Vodafone McLaren Mercedes currently has a 27-point lead in the 2007 constructors’ world championship, with its drivers Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso lying first and second in the drivers’ standings. Rookie Hamilton also secured consecutive podium finishes in the first nine of the season’s races - something no other Formula 1 driver has ever achieved in their first year of racing.
“One of the key parameters in differentiating a Formula 1 car is its aerodynamics,” explains Jonathan Neale, Managing Director, McLaren Racing. “To optimize the aerodynamics we do a lot of design work and track testing, but computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in particular has been an area of major advance for us in recent years.”
CFD simulates airflows over a Formula 1 car to help with developing its shape - primarily to create downforce. This helps to provide enhanced grip, particularly during cornering, when the driver relies on grip to carry as much speed as possible through the corner. Another major objective is to minimize drag around the car to maximize its top-end speed. CFD can also help to increase understanding of the behavior of the car in yaw (crosswind, cornering), steer (with the front wheels turned) and roll (ride-height variations).
McLaren had been using CFD for a number of years when, in 2005, it appointed SGI as its official supplier for CFD supercomputing, storage and visualization equipment. McLaren’s initial purchase included an SGI® Altix® supercomputer, visualization solutions, SGI® InfiniteStorage system and the SGI® InfiniteStorage CXFS™ shared filesystem. The company has subsequently added to this investment in July 2007, with the addition of (and ongoing enhancements to) two further SGI Altix supercomputers, and the recent introduction of the SGI® InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF).
Transforming development and testing Through its partnership with McLaren, SGI has been able to deliver a range of benefits including: · An immediate fourfold increase in productivity · A strong technical partnership that has impacted on car performance (one component of McLaren’s process was, for example, accelerated by a factor of two following input from SGI)
· An extremely high level of global technical expertise, able to deliver under pressure, and with detailed understanding of McLaren’s engineering context
· The strong partnership with software vendors and hardware partners needed to deliver application performance
“The biggest impact of CFD is on our wind tunnel testing program, where the expansion of the SGI platform over the last few years has meant that the quality of components we send to the tunnel is much higher,” says Dr. Mark Taylor, Head of CFD, McLaren Racing. “We have a much better knowledge of the impact a component will have on the performance of the car before we wind tunnel test it, with the result that more components coming from CFD end up being used on the car.”
Managing very large models Because McLaren applies CFD to models with hundreds of millions of cells, this creates very large data files. The issue then is how to handle all the data. McLaren wanted a facility that would ensure that all the data for an entire year’s car program would be available at all times, without clogging up its scratch storage facility. To achieve this, the company introduced SGI Data Migration Facility (DMF) in January 2007.
DMF enables data files that are over a certain age to be automatically taken offline to a tape facility - making the much faster scratch disk space self-managing. The system automatically takes the oldest files off first, but the CFD team is still able to access them from the tape library at any time.
“DMF has been a huge benefit, enabling us to look at results from throughout the year - which is very effective in terms of how our program works,” continues Taylor. “When we had our second phase of expansion of the SGI platform, in a sense it was proving too successful, because we were generating an even larger amount of high quality results which we wanted to retain for input into the design process. Without DMF we were deleting files that we would have preferred to keep. But when we introduced DMF we were able to retain all the data for the entire year, which has been very effective in building up our design knowledge over the program.
“As we develop forward, we’ll also be able to look back at the results for our previous cars, which will be important because the rules are remaining quite stable next year, so the current MP4-22 car will feed through a lot into the development of the MP4-23. Also looking forward, as track testing is being reduced, there’s even more emphasis on simulation to deliver increased performance. So we would expect that as the testing restrictions continue, the competitive advantage we receive from CFD will only increase.”
SGI - Innovation for Results™ SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI delivers a complete range of high-performance server and storage solutions along with industry-leading professional services and support that enable its customers to overcome the challenges of complex data-intensive workflows and accelerate breakthrough discoveries, innovation and information transformation. SGI solutions help customers solve their computing challenges whether it's enhancing the quality of life through drug research, designing and manufacturing safer and more efficient cars and airplanes, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and can be found on the Web at sgi.com
