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Altair, a global technology company providing solutions in simulation, high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence (AI), announces a new technical partnership agreement with the Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team, who has returned to the world’s most prestigious motorsports series for the 2021 season. Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team engineers are using Altair Grid Engine to optimise the team’s HPC infrastructure with its workload scheduling and management solution.

Modern Grand Prix racing has prioritised the construction of the most fuel- and energy-efficient cars, with a lower total cost. Establishing that efficiency occurs long before the car hits the track, where teams are running complex simulations using an optimised computing environment.

“Across our aerodynamics department, we’re hugely reliant on high-performance computing to manage intensive workloads,” said Bill Peters, chief technology officer, 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.”

Altair Grid Engine empowers the Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team engineering department to ensure 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 drivers like Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel to understand how design changes will impact the 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 utilising HPC,” said Sam Mahalingam, chief technical officer, 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 are prioritised, and applications and resources are used efficiently. Altair has helped the team to:

• Achieve a sustained 97 per cent 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.

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