Altair Helps Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team Optimise High-Performance Computing Infrastructure

Technology solutions company, Altair, is helping the Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One team optimise its high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. In a technical partnership agreement, Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One team engineers use the Altair Grid Engine management system to optimise the team’s HPC infrastructure with its workload scheduling and management solution.

This system helps the team be more efficient in running its computer-based simulations and managing data to build more efficient cars at a lower cost.

“Across our aerodynamics department, we’re hugely reliant on high-performance computing to manage intensive workloads,” said Bill Peters, chief technology officer of Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team. “That includes the 10 terabytes of data the team produces on a daily basis. Altair’s solutions give us a consistent and powerful infrastructure, enabling our team to gain strategic and performance advantages within a limit of 30 teraflops by achieving higher throughput, smaller wait-times, and reduced downtime.”

The Altair Grid Engine solution empowers the Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team engineering department to ensure that the tens of thousands of simulations and other compute-intensive tasks are consistently and correctly sequenced and coordinated. It provides timely and efficient access to HPC, critical to powering simulations like wind tunnels, vehicle aerodynamics, tire performance, as well as fine tuning crucial design elements. HPC also powers full-car simulations, which creates a real-world simulator; allowing team drivers, Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel, to understand how design changes will impact race-day performance of their AMR21 cars.

“The impressive Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team operates in an environment where every split-second counts, not just on the racetrack, but in terms of rapid and informed design decisions utilizing HPC,” said Sam Mahalingam, chief technical officer of Altair. “As Altair offers the industry’s most comprehensive HPC toolset, we are proud to be part of the story and will be cheering for the team over every lap of the Formula One season.”

As a result of utilising Altair Grid Engine, the Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One engineering team’s overall work throughput is faster. The most urgent requirements and results get prioritised, and applications and resources are used efficiently, thus improving ROI. Altair helps the team to:

• Achieve a sustained 97% utilisation of HPC infrastructure
• Properly manage the 10 terabytes of data the team produces daily
• Gain strategic and performance advantages within Formula One’s 25 teraflop limits by achieving higher throughput, reduced wait times and downtime

To learn more about this, you can attend the Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team’s presentation, “On and Off the Track, Every Second Counts: The Critical Role of HPC Optimization” at the Altair Global HPC Summit, 11 – 12 May 2021.

To register, visit https://web.altair.com/hpc-summit-2021.