Sauber Unveil New Supercomputer

The Sauber Formula One team have unveiled Albert, a new supercomputer for CFD calculations with which the Swiss squad hope to make further progress.

CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) serves to analyse and design aerodynamic components and is an important complement to wind tunnel work.

"By building the new wind tunnel we started a new offensive in the field of aerodynamics," said team principal Peter Sauber at the launch of the new computer.

"The launch of the supercomputer represents another step in the same direction. All of these efforts are aiming in the same direction: We intend to improve our performance and further reduce the distance between ourselves and the front runners."

According to the team, the machine is one of the most powerful in Formula One as well as the automotive industry as a whole. The computer is capable of performing 2,332,000,000,000 computing operations per second.

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 have established technology partnership agreements with all four companies.

"Aerodynamics has been steadily gaining importance in recent years, accounting for roughly three quarters of the performance of a Formula One car today. This also means that Computational Fluid Dynamics has become increasingly important," added Sauber.