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.
> 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.
To level the field even more, I think the FIA should require teams to release the design of their computer hardware after X time. That way, investments by one team on improving the system architecture spread to teams with lower budgets after a while.
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.
>> to level the field even more, I think the FIA should require teams to release the design of their computer hardware after X time.
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 is definitely trying to make the teams and their engineering more similar than different, why do you think the whole regulation part exists even? [1] If they were to be allowed to build whatever they want, F1 would have looked very different than how it looks today.
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.
>> F1 is definitely trying to make the teams and their engineering more similar than different, why do you think the whole regulation part exists even?
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.
The problem is the sloppy use of technical terms. MIPS means "millions of instructions per second" so the "p" is "per" and the "s" is "second". So it is natural for people to use FLOPS in the exact same way, but it is more correct for this to be "FLoating point OPerationS" where the "s" is used to indicate a plural.
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.
Unfortunately doing CFD is not a question of running ./cfd carmodel and waiting for a day. You need to ensure you are correlated with real life i.e. the wind tunnel.
If Williams outsourced their CFD with that leak, they might gain an unduly advantage over teams like Haas or Alfa. These teams compete over several millions in price money.
Ironically, the allowance for CFD time is scaled based on the reversed world championship points order, and Williams was dead last, so they should have the most CFD time of any of the F1 teams.
Interesting point, which a little bit implies that Williams would have the best aerodynamics by now. But clearly that is still not the case. So I am quite skeptical, whether CFD time has indeed the effect it aims to have. We all know that knowledge which you build up over time as a developer pays in long term. So even thou teams like Mercedes may have shorter time for CFD, they have the knowledge base build up over time which they use heavily.
Also, keep in mind that this year the rule is only in a demo mode. The first team has 90%, the last team has 112.5% of the dedicated time. From the next year this will change to 70% and 115%. (The time for the teams between is defined in steps of 2.5% this year, next year 5%)
Exactly CFD time does not necessarily correlate to effectiveness. The saying "all models are wrong but some models are useful" definitely applies and if you make incorrect assumptions your CFD will not be that usefel
The limit is in FLOPS but CFD is memory bound. To get round the limit, AMD made custom CPUs with restricted floating point performance to allow quadrupling the number of cores.
Each team has to submit an audit of CFD runs at 8 week intervals throughout the year. An FIA inspector can also turn up on premise to review simulations run. The full details are in Appendix 8 of the sporting regulations [0].
Yes, but that comes with a pretty heavy asterisk - driver salaries are not included in the cap for example (which will be extremely significant for the top teams), nor is marketing. Still, I think it's a step in the right direction for the sport - having a cost cap in place now lays the groundwork for tighter restrictions in the future.
As another comment mentions above, there are now budget caps, which affect every decision a team make. For instance, one of the Mercedes drivers had a really nasty crash recently and the cost to build him a new car is putting budget pressure on Merc.
This reminds me of the invented sport Paced Badminton. It’s badminton, and also the players have pacemakers and are only allowed a fixed number of heartbeats per match.
IIRC it was mostly to reduce overall expenditure on aerodynamics. Before FIA restricted resources, teams would use wind tunnels 24/7, up to 70 days per year. This was crazy expensive so the restrictions were implemented (and they happened to include CFD limits too).
Most teams have their own dedicated wind tunnels and they are fairly expensive installations. As an example, the artificial lake you see in front of the McLaren Technology Center at Woking [0] is the cooling liquid reservoir for their wind tunnel.
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.
A car size wind tunnel that can do 250 mph will be moving 400kg of air each second, and requiring a 2.5 megawatt fan. That costs ~$500k in electricity annually to run half a working day. That motor from China costs $30k. Imagine it's the same again for the fan, same again for wiring and control systems, and double that for fiberglass moulded side panels, foundations etc. We're talking £150k, and that's for a very budget wind tunnel.
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?
The onus is on the teams to prove it. If you cheat in formula 1 and they feel like punishing you a fine of one hundred million dollars is not unprecedented.
Honestly, even without outright cheating, a manufacturer team has so many advantages it's kind of pointless.
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.
