Williams' F1 team get a Top 125 super computer

THE WORLD OF FORMULA ONE is gearing up for a supercomputer war. After AMD entered the world of racing and aligned with Ferrari and later with FIA, super computers started to become an everyday thing in a world where thousandths of a second mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Right now, dedicated super-computers are present in Ferrari HQ in Maranello (AMD Opteron, Italy), BMW.Sauber in Hinwill (Intel Xeon, Switzerland), Toyota in Köln (Intel Itanium 2, Germany) and now AT&T Williams F1 is introducing a nameless supercomputer that hits right at spot 125 on Top500.org super-computing charts.

The computer was made by Lenovo, and was placed into work on July 17th. Supercomputing cluster is located at WilliamsF1 wind tunnel simulation facilities in Grove, Blighty. Machine will calculate complex CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) models in order to calculate the optimum aerodynamic setup for the teams' F1 cars.

This system is over four times more powerful than previous computer, which yielded a little less than 1 TFLOPS of computing power. WilliamsF1 team expects around 75% speed-up on their process of aerodynamic simulation. µ