Sauber installed ALBERT computer

SAUBER PETRONAS is continuing its offensive in the field of aerodynamics

source: f1technical.net

Only nine months after the launch of its ultra-modern wind tunnel, the Swiss team today presented a new supercomputer for CFD calculations to international media representatives at its headquarters in Hinwil.

"ALBERT", as the machine has been christened, is one of the most powerful in Formula 1 as well as the automotive industry as a whole. The supercomputer was built by the Swiss company DALCO and has a total of 530 AMD Opteron(tm) processors installed in High-Density Cooling Enclosures supplied by American Power Conversion (APC). The software is provided by Fluent. Sauber has established technology partnership agreements with all four companies.

CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) serves to analyse and design aerodynamic components and is an important complement to wind tunnel work. "Aerodynamics has been steadily gaining importance in recent years, accounting for roughly three quarters of the performance of a Formula 1 car today. This also means that Computational Fluid Dynamics has become increasingly important," Team Principal Peter Sauber said.

SAUBER PETRONAS has been working with a supercomputer for years. However, the growing complexity of the tasks has drastically raised the demands made on computing power. Hence, the new supercomputer is nearly 30 times more powerful than the one previously used by Sauber. This enormous power reduces computing times considerably as well as enabling much more complex tasks to be solved.