One note about the aero research rules in F1 which makes this post particularly interesting: there are limitations on the amount of CFD simulation time teams can use.
Some relevant quotes:
> For example, each Formula 1 team is only allowed to use 25 teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) of double precision (64-bit) computing power for simulating car aerodynamics.
> Oddly, the F1 regulations also stipulate that only CPUs can be used, not GPUs, and that teams must explicitly prove whether they're using AVX instructions or not. Without AVX, the FIA rates a single Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge CPU core at 4 flops; with AVX, each core is rated at 8 flops. Every team has to submit the exact specifications of their compute cluster to the FIA at the start of the season, and then a logfile after every eight weeks of ongoing testing.
> Everest says that every team has its own on-premises hardware setup and that no one has yet moved to the cloud. There's no technical reason why the cloud can't be used for car aerodynamics simulations—and F1 teams are investigating such a possibility—but the aforementioned stringent CPU stipulations currently make it impossible. The result is that most F1 teams use a somewhat hybridised setup, with a local Linux cluster outputting aerodynamics data that informs the manufacturing of physical components, the details of which are kept in the cloud.
> Wind tunnel usage is similarly restricted: F1 teams are only allowed 25 hours of "wind on" time per week to test new chassis designs. 10 years ago, in 2007, it was very different, says Everest: "There was no restriction on teraflops, no restriction on wind tunnel hours," continues Everest. "We had three shifts running the wind tunnel 24/7. It got to the point where a lot of teams were talking about building a second wind tunnel; Williams built a second tunnel.
With the new cost cap in F1 (https://www.autoweek.com/racing/formula-1/a35293542/f1-budge...) (which notably excludes driver salaries), it would be interesting to know how much these on-prem clusters cost to operate.
Also, I didn’t find it in the article, but I guess they have programmers who can work for months to speed up their software by a few percent.
But that is Not what Formula One is about... it is Not a Spec series where the cars are equal to each other. It is a competition where each team builds their own race car to compete against the other iterations of race cars built by the opposing teams. It is Not meant to be fair or equitable. We have Indycar and NASCAR for that.
Ditto with the drivers: Is Max or Lewis comparable to say a Mazepin or even a Hulkenberg? No they are Not.
It's a Spectacle, it's a Circus... that is what F1 is about. And I tell you, as a racer there is nothing else that is its equal in terms of pure audacity both from a standpoint of driving talent and car performance.
F1 (FIA really) has been using regulation to improve the sports safety, but lately they also used regulation in order to regulate how much each team spends on engineering, both money-wise and time-wise. This is to make things more equal between the teams.
- [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_regulations#Techni...
I agree, especially under the new owners. And for sure the cars are built according to each teams interpretation of the rules (which are of course subject to scrutineering). But that still leaves massive room for innovation.
Lewis is sitting in the same cockpit as Bottas is... their results are frequently vastly different due to their individual interpretation of events.
That ... doesn't make much sense, honestly.
That makes MIPS the equivalent of power (Watts) and FLOPS the equivalent of energy (Jouls). In that case limiting each Formula 1 team to a maximum of 25 teraflops of computation does make sense.
If instead you use teraflops as the equivalent of "trillion floating point operations per second" as many people do then it indeed makes less sense.
But then, the article explicitly states that they are talking about "trillion floating point operations per second".
It's probably just a mistake from the journalist.
Leak CAD model, get other people to do simulations for free!
Plausible? With insufficient contributors, pace of development would be too slow
With many, the big problem is sorting/selcting the most useful insights from the lot, but then that is probably not unlike any large org enterprise
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.how-f1s-new-slidi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/g4sboe/custom_cpu...
[0] https://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/2021_formula_1_sport...
Typical contender teams spend $300m/year.
Check out this 8 part YouTube series from Sauber about their wind tunnel installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBVgwpYUp18
These are big industrial installations which need highly specialized staff to run them. Even if the facility exists, keeping the "wind on" costs a lot of money per hour.
Ironically, as a response to the newly introduced cost cap measure, the teams are building new facilities like crazy right now, with many teams building a bigger wind tunnel so they can have it in the books before the accounting for the cost cap starts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLaren_Technology_Centre [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBVgwpYUp18
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/gas-and-...
It looks like 14-17 cents per kilowatt hour is about the going rate as of Q3 - Q4 2020.
I’m a little surprised this doesn’t lead to more such facilities being strategically located based on availability of cheap power, e.g. by building near to hydro, and where power costs can be ~2c/kWh. See: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/sunday-buzz...
I’m forced to conclude the power costs are a marginal expenditure versus other costs involved in running such a facility, and benefits from having R&D, testing and validation, and production all on the same campus?
A designer could have their own off-the-books compute cluster where they test out new ideas. Then only run the good ones on the official system.
Imagine a scenario where a brake duct needs to be redesigned to account for some change in regulation or a performance tweak. At someone like Mercedes the conversation would probably start with ok, let's dig out all of the CFD we did for this when we designed this in 2007, let's also grab the data on the changes we made on the GP2 last year, also weren't the LeMans team doing some work on this last month? From there they would be in a much better place to identify the points where they have to concentrate their efforts without expending a minute of new CFD time.
At a small new entrant team none of this data is available to them.