JEDDAH, 4 March 2005 — At the launch of the 2005 BMW Williams F1 Team car, the FW27, HP announced that the WilliamsF1 design team was able to assess twice as many aerodynamic models in computational fluid dynamics this year than ever previously possible, thus allowing the team to investigate the optimal design for the car.
The aerodynamic and structural characteristics of the FW27 were modeled on a powerful HP supercomputing infrastructure with flexible capacity provided by a utility computing system at HP Labs Bristol. This facility, which provides enterprise customers with a pay-as-you-go resource, allowed the WilliamsF1 team to manage peaks in workload.
HP technology enabled the team to perform design simulation of 1.3 terabytes of aerodynamic data. (One terabyte is a billion bytes, equivalent to 69,333 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.) The results of the simulations have allowed the team to optimize solutions for front and rear wings, brake ducts and radiator ducts without the expense and time of fabrication or wind tunnel testing. The utility computing facility at HP Labs and the installation of a new HP cluster platform 4000 Supercomputer system as Williams F1’s primary computing resource at their Grove, UK, headquarters have increased the team’s computer modeling capabilities in 2005 by more than a factor of three.
“Prediction, using computational fluid dynamics, was our main tool to assess the implications of the new FIA rules for the 2005 season, and to consider a wide range of potential solutions. Together with our partner HP, we have scaled up our computational resource by a factor of three. We augmented our in-house capability with the use of HP’s Bristol Labs utility computing facility, which allows us to run computations using external resource at peak load times, such as during the new car design phase,” Sam Michael, technical director at Williams F1, said.
HP provided further support in structural analysis and crash test simulations for the FW27, which were carried out in-house at Grove using HP Integrity systems. WilliamsF1 engineers are using the HP Labs utility computing facility to take structural and crash analysis to a new level of fidelity by creating sophisticated models of carbon fiber, which demands a tenfold increase in computer power.
“HP is committed to further developing the partnership that started in 2000 with the BMW Williams F1 Team,” said Andrew Collis, director, Global Sports Sponsorship, HP. “It is our aim to provide the team with the breadth and depth of technical expertise that HP has, making an invaluable contribution to their performance.”
