The new supercomputer: Albert3

The new BMW Sauber supercomputer, Albert3, again with Quadrics interconnect, will have 4,224 processor cores and 50.7 Teraflops computing power.For more information please visit: bmw-sauber-f1 .


The BMW Sauber F1 Team presented its supercomputer Albert2 in December 2006. The 21-tonne facility for CFD calculations was already based on Intel technology (consisting of processors, the motherboard, chip set and server housing) and was at the time of start-up one of the most powerful in Formula One. Albert2 had 256 nodes with two Intel®Xeon® 5160 Dual Core processors each (two cores per processor). That amounted to a total of 1,024 processor cores. The capacity of the main memory was 2,048 GB and maximum computing power was 12.28 TFlops (12,288 GFlops). It wasn’t long before another 32 nodes were added, bringing the total to 288 nodes or 1,152 processor cores. Now the BMW Sauber F1 Team has ushered in the next stage and upgraded the existing computer. 384 nodes equipped with Intel®Xeon®E5472 Quad Core processors (four cores per processor) and related Intel technology have been added to the previous system, which means the new Albert3 supercomputer now has a total of more than 4,224 processor cores at its disposal. The computer’s RAM has grown to 8,448 GB and maximum computing power to 50.7 TFlops. That is a phenomenal 50,700,000,000,000 computations per second. To match this computing performance, the entire population of Munich and Berlin (4.7 million) would have to multiply two eightdigit numbers every three seconds for a whole year. In the current top 500 rankings of active supercomputers worldwide, this performance merits 45th place (third place among systems in industrial use). The new supercomputer, developed like its forerunner by the Swiss company Dalco and running on CFD software by Ansys-Fluent, weighs in at 38 tonnes yet has a footprint of just 24 square metres. The tremendous technical potential of Albert3 is harnessed for analysis in the field of aerodynamics. With its help, the specialists calculate components for the Formula One race cars, using grid models often made up of more than 100 million cells. CFD plays a particularly crucial role in the development of front, rear and auxiliary wings, as well as in engine and brake cooling. Computer-aided air flow simulation is not in competition with the work in the wind tunnel, but rather complements it. “A great advantage of CFD is that you can represent the air stream visually and that way understand why one component is better than another,” explains Willem Toet, Head of Aerodynamics. BMW Motorsport Director Mario Theissen says: “Unlike the other teams, we are not planning to build a second Formula One wind tunnel, but in future will continue to concentrate on the steadily expanding possibilities in the field of simulation.”

Acknowledgements: this article appeared on automobilesreview website on August 6th 2008.