iTechNote

On 14 Dec, Albert² - the fastest Supercomputer in Europe and the third fastest worldwide used in industry - was delivered to the BMW Sauber F1 Team for their demanding work in aerodynamics. With over 12 Teraflops peak performance the system ranks 60th on the Supercomputer TOP500 November 2006 list.

BMW Sauber F1 Team uses FLUENT® CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) code, one of the most powerful and widely used CFD tools in Formula One racing. FLUENT technology can be applied to a number of areas of the racing car, allowing team engineers to quickly and accurately test a number of possible designs before developing only the most promising for wind tunnel testing.

FLUENT software is now part of the ANSYS CFD suite, from the company’s recent acquisition of Fluent Inc.

The launch of the new supercomputer Albert² coincides with the launch of the new FLUENT 6.3 software, which improves the operational efficiency of this flagship CFD tool. The improvements focus on the FLUENT core solver, delivering greater speed and flexibility to the user. Automatic techniques to use polyhedral meshing have been added, allowing faster convergence of solution. Parallel processing has been enhanced, enabling a near-linear scaling in computing power.

All those improvements are to the full benefit of the BMW Sauber F1 Team and can be fully exploited with its new supercomputer.

Albert² is to be used for CFD aerodynamics analysis of F1 car components. The CFD calculations use numerical grid models that often consist of more than 100 million cells. CFD plays an important part in the development of front, rear and auxiliary wings as well as engine and brake cooling as another key area.

How fast is Albert²?

1. The Great Pyramid of Cheops was built in a mere 20 years, using an estimated 2,300,000 blocks, with an average weight of 2.5 tons each. Therefore, its average building rate was about 13 blocks per hour, or 1 block about every four and a half minutes.

If one arithmetic computer operation is equated to the laying of one block, then Albert² would be able to “build” about 4 million complete Great Pyramids per second or 25 billion pyramids over 20 years.

2. 1.3 million people multiplying two eight digit numbers together every 3.5 seconds for a year would just about match what Albert² can do in one second.

What is inside Albert²?

There are 256 nodes with two Intel Xeon 5160 processors (dual core) each, for a total of 512 processors or 1024 cores. Over 2000 gigabytes of memory (2048 to be exact) is installed in highly specialized cabinets supplied by APC. These combine power supply, cooling and environmental monitoring in an optimized rack construction. The supercomputer consists of ten racks, each having a dimension of 1mx2.3mx1.20m. This results in a total weight of 21 tons. The processors are hot swappable, one at a time and replaceable with higher performance processors such as Xeon 5300 Quad Core processors in the future.

DALCO is the parent of Albert².