italian sports car design company races ahead with supercomputer

[King_of_lion]

Top racing drivers like Lewis Hamilton can race around the track at over 300km per hour. Driving skills aside, it is the aerodynamic shape of the car, like the way the wind flows around it and how it handles around the bend, which substantially contributes to the speed of the car. “The name of the game today is speed,” said Dr Andrea Pontremoli, the chief executive officer of Dallara, an Italian company founded in 1972 to design racing cars. “It is really changing a lot of our economy and our way of working because every car wants to win, so we need to innovate rapidly too,” he added. The sports car design company has turned to supercomputing technology to ramp up its innovation capability. A supercomputing cluster enables Dallara engineers to optimise a car’s aerodynamic contours which involves deciding its shape and then running simulations and testing in wind tunnels. The company is using a NeXtScale cluster running Lenovo nx360 M5 compute nodes, which are two-socket systems that run Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 processor and a software-defined storage solution running on Lenovo System x3650 M5 servers. The setup also includes a V3700 V2 storage system and RackSwitch G8052 1/10 Ethernet switch. The entire packages runs on Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux operating system. Lenovo worked closely with Dallara to produce the cluster. Per Overgaard, executive director of Lenovo’s Data Centre Group, said it worked to provide the cluster according to Lenovo’s specifications. “They gave us the specs, their idea of what they wanted to do, and we put together the cluster.” Dr Pontremoli said that the supercomputer allows the company to work on a new design from a concept on paper to car in just nine months. This is critical because eight months are spent on the car’s concept including designing, testing, simulating, collecting data and reiterating the process until an optimised racing car is completed. In the process, billions of data points are collected and crunched by the supercomputer which can run aerodynamic features like computational fluid dynamic (CFD) models with 300 million cells in just 2.5 hours. Previously, this took five hours. The supercomputer can also now run several simulations simultaneously, so that different teams and departments do not need to wait to run their analyses.