RF1 makes swift calculations

The Renault Formula One (RF1) team has revealed details of how it will use one of the world's most powerful supercomputers in a bid to give its car designers a winning edge for the 2009 season.

Set up with support from industrial partners Appro and Boeing, RF1 unveiled its Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) capability at its UK base in Enstone, Oxfordshire.

The £10m centre (pictured below and throughout)  is one of the most advanced CFD facilities in Formula One (F1) and is expected to provide major spin-off benefits to industries including aerospace and defence.

CFD is a modelling approach that uses numerical methods to analyse fluid flow around an object, typically one that is required to be aerodynamic. The equations needed to model the flow around an F1 car are complex and require the use of a supercomputer, provided by US high-performance computing specialist Appro.

In keeping with the company's French roots, the RF1 team named the Xtreme-X2 supercomputer Mistral, after the strong wind that sweeps across France.

Mistral is one of the most powerful systems dedicated to a single application anywhere in the world, according to RF1. Mistral effectively creates a virtual wind tunnel in which the team can test aerodynamic designs.

The system embodies over 500 computer nodes that hold dual socket AMD Quad-core processors. Each node provides eight processing cores and 16GBytes of memory. The entire system has in excess of 4,000 cores and 8TBytes of memory. Stretching to 52m, Mistral has the same power as 1,000 high-performance PCs and can perform 38 trillion calculations per second.

The supercomputer is housed in RF1's new 1025m2 underground CFD facility in rural Oxfordshire. The unconventional subterranean location is beneficial to Mistral's performance. Graeme Hackland, IT manager for RF1, said: 'The major problems that most of the supercomputers in the world have are power and cooling, so we really focused on that. Putting the building underground helps us with cooling as it's a fairly constant temperature.'