In the intensely competitive world of Formula 1 motor racing, the world's top design engineers are constantly seeking that perfect balance between performance and reliability.
In theory, the ultimate F1 car should be good for precisely one race distance before it falls apart. If it lasts any longer, this indicates that performance must have been fractionally compromised in favour of reliability or vice versa if it doesn't quite go the distance.
The search for that perfect balance between maximum performance and optimal reliability is achieved by analysis--in minute detail--of the various aerodynamic and structural characteristics of the thousands of components that comprise the McLaren car.
Playing a vital role in solving these massively complex situations is Sun's state-of-the-art High Performance computing (HPC) technology. The delivery of two Sun Technical Compute Farm (Sun TCF) systems in 2001 has enabled McLaren to shrink its design cycles significantly. This makes it possible to consider more iterations of each component within a set time frame, a vital factor in the F1 design engineer's eternal quest for the perfect balance between performance and reliability.
The Sun TCF--a powerful, scalable system for High Performance Computing--is a complete rack-based solution that integrates Sun's industry-leading enterprise servers, computing engines and storage arrays for a very effective distributed computing environment. At the very heart of this cluster grid is Sun's Grid Engine software.
The cluster grid system enables McLaren to prioritise and streamline heavy workloads by more effectively utilising resources, including CPU memory and storage. Effectively, unused memory from computers within McLaren International is allocated to areas in which additional processing power is required and is of primary benefit to the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) team.
Since the computing grid's installation last year, it has reduced some of the design times involved in the development of the new season's car by as much as 95%.
As Sun's Vice President of Volume System Products, Neil Knox explains: "F1 is all about speed, not just speed on the track but also speed of development. That, in turn, mostly equates to speed of calculation. Sun's grid computing expertise and high performance systems based on the Solaris Operating Environment provide the calculation horsepower, scalability and reliability necessary to be successful in this compute-hungry environment."
With a stack of 112 processors generating 50 gigaflops of compute power, the Sun TCF systems are in continuous operation, 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week, solving complex equations relating to the aerodynamic and load-bearing characteristics of the various components and the car.
"Sun's Technical Compute Farm systems are the most powerful tools we've got in terms of evaluating our design, allowing us to identify and eliminate weaknesses in the car quickly and efficiently. This translates into performance and reliability on the track," says Dr Guan Chew, Head of Structure's Group at McLaren International.
"High Performance Computing allows us to break down a complex structure into a large number of small elements, analyse the strength of every component with a great degree of accuracy and then design out all the weak points."
As an illustration of the extent to which HPC has speeded up the design process, he cites the example of the side impact structure, which, according to Formula One regulations, has to take a load of fifteen tonnes. "The first multi-processor we had took 20 hours to do a complete analysis of a single design. With the Sun TCF systems we can do the job in 3 hours. That means in one day we can now analyse four different iterations and four more overnight, giving us a lot more options and a more efficient design cycle."
Considerable Savings in Time and Money
More than 90 percent of McLaren International's current Sun HPC capacity is reserved for the CFD team, which routinely uses it to analyse the aerodynamic design not just of individual components and assemblies in isolation, but of the car as a whole. The team also benefits from the 30 percent extra power and advanced graphics of the 64-bit Sun Blade 1000 workstation, which is based on the award winning UltraSPARC III processor. And with the availability of the new high performance, 1.05 Ghz-based Sun Blade 2000 workstation, McLaren engineers now have access to systems offering the world's fastest floating point performance.
The biggest single simulation that the team runs is the analysis in real time of the simulated airflow over every external aerodynamic surface of the virtual car, including the wing mirror, and involves breaking it down into 20 or 30 million separate elements. With the Sun TCF systems, design cycles have been cut from weeks to just days, saving the team from traditionally costly and time consuming outsourcing to British Aerospace.
"McLaren was one of the first teams to do these very large-scale studies, analysing a lot of the car in one go," says CFD team leader Kevin Colburn. "The others have caught up a bit now but we believe we are still ahead."
The great advantage of such advanced virtual testing is that it saves huge amounts of time, effort and money by allowing the engineers to refine their designs and narrow down the options before they go to the wind tunnel. "We're now putting smarter designs into the wind tunnel, designs that are already closer to being optimised," says Colburn. "Typically, we might look at 10 or 15 different wing configurations before selecting the best one to be dropped into the wind tunnel. In that way we are able to use the tunnel more effectively."
The combination of the Sun TCF systems and Sun Blade 1000 workstations has sped up the design process to the point where, for the first time last season, a front wing was completely redesigned, tested, manufactured and fitted to the car between races. Even so, Colburn and his colleagues at McLaren are constantly hungry for more speed and more power from their systems. "In the intensely competitive world of Formula One, you can never afford to stand still because that means effectively that you are going backwards," says Colburn.
"Every time you think the car is as fast as it's ever going to get, you somewhere find a way of making it go better. It's like an envelope in which you are trying to find all four corners. You push one corner and find the boundary there and then push it in another area and the envelope changes shape and opens up new possibilities that then have to be explored."
At any given time, more concentrated compute power is used in the design of a West McLaren Mercedes F1 car than goes into the Eurofighter. The motor racing and aerospace industries are comparable in many areas, especially in their respective needs for leading edge technology, and both make use of similar mechanical computer-aided engineering software, including LS-Dyna and Star CD.
"The complexities of the models they are working with are roughly comparable," says Henry Fong, Senior Business Development Manager for MCAE at Sun. "The difference with McLaren is that they have an oppressive time frame. They are constantly up against the clock and the calendar. With a jet fighter you are looking at maybe a 10 year development programme whereas with an F1 car you're talking about months, sometimes even weeks."
Summarising the benefits that have come since the installation of the Sun TCF systems, Jonathan Neale, Operations Director at McLaren International says "the ability to speed up our processing power means better ideas faster, and ultimately that is critical. Track time is very limited and expensive and the more ironing out of ideas we can do upstream the more efficient the whole process becomes."
"The F1 pack is getting closer together and these developments are giving us that slight edge. We are not limited by our ideas, only by the time it takes to process them, and Sun's HPC capabilities are a major tool in our constant quest for improvement and innovation."
Looking back over the 15-year association with Sun, McLaren International Managing Director Martin Whitmarsh comments: "In the volatile world of IT, a relationship of that length is quite remarkable. Sun has changed the way we develop our product with its cutting edge technology and we are doing things now that we could not have dreamed of doing before. But we still want more and we want it quicker."
It is a challenge that is welcomed by Sun. Acknowledging that McLaren's requirements for massive computing power and high availability can be challenging, Sun's Neil Knox adds: "Our relationship is very strong because McLaren runs its business just like we do at Sun insofar as they are driven and extremely aggressive in their technology, always wanting to break into new areas. They want to push the envelope and so do we. We pride ourselves on being every bit as competitive as they are."
No comments:
Post a Comment