Red Bull Racing revs up computing grid

The Red Bull Racing Formula One team is using grid computing to help design and build the car it hopes can take on and beat Lewis Hamilton in 2009.

The 2009 season has seen the biggest change in regulations in Formula One for some time - including the introduction of drastically different design regulations.

Red Bull Racing's business development manager, Steve Nevey, told silicon.com: "The majority of the regulation changes are around aero - the cars are quite different this year."

As a result of the upheaval, teams are facing a greater need for computing power in the racing car design process.

For Red Bull, that means enlisting the help of Platform Computing to help manage the processing power required for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) - an advanced aerodynamics simulation technology to simulate how air flows across bodywork, allowing the team to design a car that travels through the air as quickly as possible.

"Being able to make CFD analysis effectively and efficiently has made a big difference. The name of the game is going though as many iterations [of the car] as you can. The team that goes through the most iterations has the better optimised car, and therefore will be the quicker," Nevey added.

The use of CFD requires large amounts of computing power - where Platform's grid computing comes in.

The company's LSF grid technology exploits the idle processing power of computers on the team's local network to boost the capacity of the team's supercomputer.

Following restrictions on car testing, Red Bull Racing now uses around 3,000 cores in its supercomputer to boost its simulation capacity - around double used a year ago.

The Platform technology has also given Red Bull the ability to intelligently schedule workloads and allocate computing power more appropriately so jobs can be run in parallel. Its reporting technology also allows the team to see how processing power is being used.

In the future, Nevey said it's likely the grid will soon incorporate the team's computer-aided design machines while the team is looking to develop a multi-physics simulator to bring all the various data together.

Since Red Bull Racing started to work with Platform it has boosted the amount of analysis it can carry out by 20 per cent. The team has been using technology from Platform for several seasons and has subsequently extended the partnership to 2014.

For Nevey, the benefits are clear. "I must admit we're pretty confident with our car at the moment - it seems to be performing extremely well at the tests," he told silicon.com.