good evening a light smattering of
applause thanks for having me here
tonight it's a great honor and a great
pleasure to come and talk to you about
formula 1 formula 1 is arguably the
greatest racing spectacle on earth
there's a hundred hundreds well there's
a Formula one fan I knew who's going to
be one 500 million fans who tuned in to
the event every single time we put on a
race
it really is arguably the greatest
racing spectacle but we have Formula One
we have a mission we want to make it
more engaging more intriguing just a
better overall product something what
entertains more and there's a key
strategic moment coming up for us an
opportunity in 2021 where we're going to
make seismic shifts and changes in the
technical regulations in the sports and
regulations in the sport overall and
when we engaged our fan base and we
asked them what do you want the biggest
thing that everybody wants is more wheel
to wheel racing they want to see the
cars you know inches from each other and
racing like all of them great iconic
moments that you've seen and the enabler
to do that believe it or not is there a
dynamics so let's talk about the
aerodynamics and I'm going to take you
through that story so the first part of
it is aerodynamics why bother
what does it do the team's work
relentlessly to produce downforce
downforce is what pushes the current in
the ground it's what's creates grip it's
what makes the cars such a spectacle
going around the corners at such high
speed and then you've got the other part
of aerodynamics which is drag drag is
the part that slows the car down in a
straight line so as the car goes down
the straight being powered by a thousand
horsepower the drugs trying to slow it
down so you want to maximize the
downforce
but you want to minimize the drag and if
we look at the development rates in
Formula one of downforce in particular
it's huge
it's immense so the curve that you can
see behind me here is is is it's fairly
representative of a downforce curve and
as the speed increases the downforce
goes up and it's exactly the opposite of
an aeroplane so when you sit on the
tarmac and you go down the runway as you
as you build up the speed eventually the
wings give the aircraft enough lift and
it goes up in the air Formula One car is
exactly the opposite as the speed goes
up it gets pushed further and further
into the ground and at a certain speed
as you can see here and around about 100
mile an hour this is just to give you an
example of how much downforce these cars
generate around about 100 mile an hour
it creates about a thousand kilos of
downforce which is about the kerb weight
of the car so that means that if we
turned the racetrack upside down and run
it above hundred mile an hour it would
actually be able to run upside down and
stick to the ceiling so how do we
develop aerodynamics there's two ways
that we develop aerodynamics in Formula
one large teams of Engineers they work
in the wind tunnel and they work in CFD
computational fluid dynamics the wind
tunnel it's a scale model around about
half the size of the car it's a very
very accurate representation we make
changes to that scale model we blow air
over it inside the wind tunnel and we
check whether them changes are positive
or not computational fluid dynamics
instead is essentially a virtual car in
a virtual airspace and we've been using
CFD now for about twenty years and as
we've got more and more sophisticated
with CFD it's given us more and more
insight into the flow physics and what
you see behind me here is a really
really interesting slice of the rear
axle of a Formula One car those two blue
dots that you can see towards the center
line they're called the vortex
structures and vortex structures of the
aerodynamicists friend because they're
very very high energy airflow that go
under the diffuser underneath the floor
of the car and they create suction and
pull the cone at the ground and create
grip the pink hue that you see around
the outside of the car that's called the
aerodynamic wake and what the
aerodynamic wave does is when that when
the freestream when the air passes over
the car it gets very very turb
it becomes non laminar and it creates
this wake which is which is which is bad
for aerodynamics wait bad okay
and when we looked at how we were going
to improve Formula one it was this
weight structure that we had to improve
and essentially this gives us the
development the golden triangle in
Formula one where you got from CFD to
wind tunnel to the track you test it and
then you go back again and you keep
going round and round this golden
triangle and CFD plays a huge part plays
a very very key part in the development
and CFD has always been a supercomputer
problem it's always been a HPC problem
the architecture that you can see behind
me here believe it or not is the first
architecture that we used in Formula one
and what we did was we took 20 CAD
terminals and when the designers went
home on a night we used to daisy-chain
them all together and we made our first
supercomputer a twenty core
supercomputer believe it or not that's
exactly what we did them used to do the
CFD runs and when they came back in in
the morning we disassembled them today
we used around about 200 cores within
the teams and it's about two and a half
thousand times the computational power
that you can see of that architecture
there behind me so let's frame the
problem the problem is this the car
behind the red car in our diagram here
when it's one second behind it loses 30%
of the downforce a huge number okay when
it's half a second behind which is the
speed that you need to close in and get
this wheel to wheel racing that we're
searching for it's losing 40 percent so
we turn to formula what we turn to
aerodynamics and the CFD in Formula 1 in
order to try and solve this problem and
what we had to do is we had to build the
two car simulation what you see behind
me is the current generation of cars and
when you see the wake effect when we go
into the pressure domain and you see the
wake effect of that car behind you can
see how powerful it is and how much it
destroys the aerodynamics of the car
behind this is
where we lose around about half of the
downforce so what we have to do is you
have to set around designing a new
generation of car in order to improve
the wake effect and what you see behind
me here is the 2021 version this is
what's coming up okay and what you're
going to get is this animation moves
round is a drivers eye view so right now
you can be sat behind in that car and
you can see the wake effect it's an up
washing wake and it's going over the car
but we had to completely redesign the
car to make that happen it's a huge hpc
problem a massive hpc problem and this
is where the partnership between Formula
One and AWS was so important to
companies their DNA in problem solving
let's just try and frame for a second
the size of the hpc problem we've got if
you take a single car a single car CFD
run and you take the most powerful home
computer on the market today if you
wanted to do one run with a single car
not the two cars that we're talking
about it would take you around about 14
days two weeks even with the team
technology of 200 cause it still takes
about four days to do that to car
simulation it's nowhere near absolutely
nowhere near the agility that we need in
order to develop a new Formula One a
better Formula One okay
partnering with AWS and their cloud HPC
services ec2 the first iteration for a
two car simulation we got down to 11 and
a half hours
we're now at less than half when we're
now at less than eight hours eight hours
to do a two car simulation so it's
absolutely incredible what we've been
able to do it gave us the agility to be
able to move forward and I'm going to
give you some some what when we were
putting this together this talk together
I'm not American I don't know whether
you've noticed but some of the guys who
were putting together they call these
the face-melting stats I think this
really is Facebook this is an email that
received just some weeks ago about where
we are now with with what we call the
mic model which is up there okay
we had 7300 cause solving 14 cases all
are pretty much the same time 2.7
billion cells within the CFD models to
solve and we did it all in less than 30
hours it's absolutely incredible what
we've been able to do and what that's
done is it's give you this behind me the
2021 challenger this is what we hope is
going to change Formula one and we are
hopeful it's exactly what the fans are
asking for so what are the results the
results of this okay at one second
behind rather than losing the 30% of
downforce we're now losing 5% of
downforce all right half a second behind
7% it's huge it means that the cars been
pushed into the ground water means we
can get this wheel-to-wheel action okay
it's exactly what we've been searching
for and we're really really hopeful that
it's going to make a better show okay
two great companies two great
partnerships okay or a great partnership
Formula One AWS the DNA in problem
solving thanks very much for having me
it's been an absolute pleasure
[Applause]
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