big room for tiny air particles

"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." Mario Theissen, BMW Motorsport director Computer Aided Design is extremely demanding over past 30 years since the introduction of the super computers in 1980s. Computational Fluid Dynamics [CFD] offers a great flexibility on analysis of air flow. It can evaluate the design very quickly and push the design to limits by creating tons of “what-if” alternatives. Using digital tools are seem to be much more efficient in terms of time and space for testing models. For calculating the limitless design options, CFD requires extremely large computer-based capacity. “Albert”, one of the most powerful super computers in the automotive industry is introduced by the BMW Sauber F1 Team. "Albert" is capable of performing 2,332,000,000,000 computing operations per second. To achieve the same computing performance, the entire population of the city of Zurich (350,000) would have to multiply two eight-digit figures every four seconds for a whole year. The machine has over 1,085,440 megabytes of physical memory and over 10,880 gigabytes of hard-drive storage. BMW Sauber use all this power for calculations in CFD and FEA. Enormous “size” created by “Albert” is only valid in the virtual digital space. The room holding those processors including the cooling systems uses up 24 sqm footprint only. Reference _ http://www.dalco.ch/news/messages/news_item/article/bmw-sauber-f1-teams-new-supercomputer-albert-3/?tx_ttnews _ http://f1-dictionary.110mb.com/cfd.html