Supercomputer aims to give Williams F1 competitive edge

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The AT&T Williams Formula One (F1) race team is using a new supercomputer to enhance its high performance computing capabilities for designing a faster car.

As the only independent team currently left in the sport, Williams has been able to capitalise on the supercomputing hardware and expertise of PC maker Lenovo as part of corporate tie-up between the two agreed earlier this year.

The team has worked closely with Lenovo since February to design, build and install a 166-node supercomputer at its Oxfordshire manufacturing and test site. The system went live in August after Lenovo sent a team from Beijing to install it.

It is already being used to power compute-intensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) design and testing simulations, which are paying dividends on the track, according to Alex Burns, Williams F1's chief operating officer.

"You can see the results applied to our first products at Monza," he said. "The supercomputer is now also being heavily used in developing the 2008 car. Lots of its surfaces will be designed on not only the new supercomputer, but also the new ThinkStation workstations."

Williams will be one of the first to use the new Lenovo ThinkStation workstations launched at its Oxfordshire facility today, when they are available in the New Year.

The new workstations are designed for heavy computing intensive needs, like those CFD requirements or Williams and be the first PCs to use 45-nanometer semiconductor production process featured in Intel's upcoming quad-core Xeon processor 5400 series and Intel's Core 2 Extreme processors, along with the latest graphic cards from NVIDIA.

Burns said the new workstations were hotly a anticipated complement to Williams' new supercomputing capabilities.

"Our designers work is gated by their ability to pull and manipulate big model files and run analysis on them," he said. "We are expecting the new ThinkStations to allow our engineers to bring through more productivity, more quickly."

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