BMW Sauber F1 Team's new supercomputer - Albert 3

In December 2006, the BMW Sauber F1 Team introduced their supercomputer, Albert2. This system, based on Intel Technology (processors, mainboards and chassis) and with a total weight of 21 Tons, was already one of the most powerful supercomputers in Formula 1 when it was launched. Albert 2 featured 256 compute nodes, each with two Intel Xeon 5160 dualcore processors, which gave a total of 1024 processor cores. The capacity of the main memory was 2048 GBytes and the maximum compute power was 12,28 TFlops (12.288 GFlops). An extension of 32 more compute nodes to a total of 288 nodes or 1.152 processor cores was added soon afterwards.

Now, BMW Sauber F1 Team has launched the next step by extending the existing system. A further 384 nodes, equipped with Intel Xeon E5472 quadcore processors (four cores per processor) and related Intel technology where added to the existing system so that the new supercomputer, Albert3, now has 4224 cores. The main memory grew to 8448 GBytes and the peak compute power is now at 57,7 TFlops, that's 50.700.000.000.000 arithmetic operations per second. In order to achieve the same compute power, all residents of the two cities Munich and Berlin (4.7 million) would have to multiply two eight digit numbers every three seconds during one whole year. The new performance corresponds to rank 45 on the worldwide top500 list of currently running systems and rank 3 of all systems in private industry.

The new supercomputer which, like its predecessor, was developed by DALCO and which runs CFD-software from Ansys-Fluent, has a total weight of 38 tons and covers an area of only 24 square meters.

The enormous technical potential of Albert3 is being used for analysis in the field of aerodynamics. With its help, the specialists calculate parts for the Formula 1 racer. The meshes used for these calculations are often larger than 100 million cells. CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) plays an especially important role in the development of front, rear and auxiliary wings as well as for engine and brake cooling.

The computer aided simulation is not in competition with the real wind tunnel but complements it. "A big advantage of CFD is, that you can visualize the air stream and thus understand why some parts are better than others", explains Willem Toet, Head of Aerodynamics.

BMW Motorsport director Mario Theissen says: "Unlike other teams we are not planing to build a second wind tunnel, we will focus on the continuously growing possibilities in the field of simulation in the future."