Partnership to significantly boost Force India F1 team's engineering design abilities using CFD

PUNE, India, Dec. 16 -- Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons, and Force India Formula One Team (FIF1), India's first and only F1 team, today announced an exclusive three-year multi-million dollar partnership deal to offer a fully automated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solution to aid the design of the team's next-generation race cars as well improve aerodynamic efficiency in the current racing models. This will be the first time a Formula 1 team will leverage an Indian HPC (high performance computing) organization for their design activities.
 
In conjunction with physical wind tunnel and straight line testing, Force India relies on virtual prototypes and CFD methods to improve racing car aerodynamics and accuracy by conducting complex simulations without compromising processing times. The sheer computing power provided by CRL will enable Force India to reduce its design cycle times, thus providing the team's drivers with the best chance of a strong result.
 
With this partnership, Force India's design team will now have access to 'eka', India's fastest supercomputer and one of the most versatile supercomputers in the world that is capable of 133 trillion calculations per second! The new system will increase Force India's CFD computing capacity in the first year by a factor of at least four, allowing the team to model the car's aerodynamics in much more detail and deliver results in greatly reduced time frames.
 
Dr. Vijay Mallya, chairman and team principal, Force India Formula One Team Limited said, "Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are a critical part of Force India's car design process to continually improve the team's aerodynamic performance. The tie-up with CRL will significantly accelerate Force India's computational simulations to drive better on-track results. The tie-up with CRL gives us an immediate 200 percent increase in our CFD processing capability which will rise to almost 800 percent by the end of 2010. We have integrated our own CFD methods with the CRL facility to allow Force India's CFD engineers to seamlessly interface between the UK and India effectively, giving us increased processing power. The CRL facility allows us to run significantly more CFD cases, in the region of 200 percent more cases per day, with twice the model size currently possible. In the future this will increase still further and also allow Force India to undertake significant development of the current CFD methods in us."
 
Mr. S Ramadorai, chairman, CRL, said:  "With this partnership, CRL reconfirms its commitment to develop technology that will aid in design activities and make it seamless for the companies to take advantage of HPC. We are really proud to be associated with a brand such as Force India Formula One Team which has showcased India as a team to watch in the global motor racing arena. This deal demonstrates the value that an organization can get by leveraging 'eka', and the complete HPC support ecosystem we have set up at CRL."

Virtual wind tunnel simulation applications on 'eka', using CFD, can help address the limitations of a testing environment in understanding the impact of design on the aerodynamic abilities of aeroplanes and automobiles. The CFD designs for Formula One cars, are amongst the most complicated, and require extremely high computing powers for timely and accurate results. CRL will provide Force India with a complete HPC ecosystem, ranging from fully automated pre-processing to post-processing simulation work flow on 'eka', customized configurations to application optimization services for Force India's design activities.

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Source: Tata Sons Ltd.