7 ms·

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 ca

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.

jsmith99 5y ago
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. https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/g4sboe/custom_cpus_in_formula_1_how_amd_boosted_ferrari/ https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/g4sboe/custom_cpu...
- gripfx 5y ago
  That was awhile back. The rules have since been updated to be more flexible. AMD now has a multi-year partnership with Mercedes F1
  - mkoubaa 5y ago
    And now there are some CFD solvers that can use the GPU effectively
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
londons_explore 5y ago
Strategy: Leak CAD model, get other people to do simulations for free!
- mhh__ 5y ago
  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.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    "Accidentally" leak the wndtnl-cor-current (1).csv file as well :).
- choeger 5y ago
  You can be certain that Williams' competitors will have a very close look at this leak. The regulations were written with such loopholes in mind.
  - swarnie_ 5y ago
    Why would you study one of the worst cars on the grid? For a laugh at the Christmas party?
    - choeger 5y ago
      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.
    - Havoc 5y ago
      Even a bad car might have a lesson or two in it
    - FridayoLeary 5y ago
      it probably still a lot faster then a volkswagen golf. More like a wild spin on New Years'...
  - bitL 5y ago
    It's not a leaked model, it was a 3D model grabbed from some mobile game...
- toss1 5y ago
  Seems you mean an attempt at open-source F1 car development... 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
londons_explore 5y ago
Is that limitation to reduce the cost of competing for those who don't have big GPU farms?
- mlyle 5y ago
  Everyone has tons of resources / big GPU farms / etc in F1. It's one of many limitations to stop the cost to be competitive from going to infinity. Typical contender teams spend $300m/year.
  - peteretep 5y ago
    What is a typical team? Biggest teams spend $450m, smallest spend $130m. The resource difference is very real, and the mean hides that.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      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.
      - AnthonBerg 5y ago
        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.
  - bhoflack 5y ago
    Since this year the budget cap for the teams is set to $145m/year.
    - dgritsko 5y ago
      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.
berkut 5y ago
Actually, the limit is in TFLOPs, and the use of CFD is audited.
- wiz21c 5y ago
  How do they actually check the total hours of CPU usage ?
  - gripfx 5y ago
    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]. [0] https://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/2021_formula_1_sporting_regulations_-_iss_7_-_2021-03-19.pdf https://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/2021_formula_1_sport...
op03 5y ago
What? How is that even enforced?
- mhh__ 5y ago
  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.
  - avmich 5y ago
    And nobody uses parallel construction?
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
      Guessing what you meant here if it wasn’t obvious: 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.
    - magicalhippo 5y ago
      The difficulty of policing parallel construction was one of the key arguments against the cost-cap, IIRC.
      - VBprogrammer 5y ago
        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.
quux 5y ago
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.
- kalal 5y ago
  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.
  - pionar 5y ago
    That rule was only implemented this year, so there is no data on that yet.
  - BadOakOx 5y ago
    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%) https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.how-f1s-new-sliding-scale-aero-testing-rules-work-and-what-impact-they-will.pn0sG8N4A0cjbNRbdYx8a.html https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.how-f1s-new-slidi...
  - mkoubaa 5y ago
    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
cepth 5y ago
In 2017, Ars Technica did a deep dive into computation in Formula 1 (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/04/formula-1-technology/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/04/formula-1-technology/). 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-budget-cap-will-help-even-playing-field/ 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.
- Someone 5y ago
  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.

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.

jsmith99 5y ago

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. https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/g4sboe/custom_cpus_in_formula_1_how_amd_boosted_ferrari/ https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/g4sboe/custom_cpu...

gripfx 5y ago
That was awhile back. The rules have since been updated to be more flexible. AMD now has a multi-year partnership with Mercedes F1
- mkoubaa 5y ago
  And now there are some CFD solvers that can use the GPU effectively

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

londons_explore 5y ago

Strategy: Leak CAD model, get other people to do simulations for free!

mhh__ 5y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  "Accidentally" leak the wndtnl-cor-current (1).csv file as well :).
choeger 5y ago
You can be certain that Williams' competitors will have a very close look at this leak. The regulations were written with such loopholes in mind.
- swarnie_ 5y ago
  Why would you study one of the worst cars on the grid? For a laugh at the Christmas party?
  - choeger 5y ago
    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.
  - Havoc 5y ago
    Even a bad car might have a lesson or two in it
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    it probably still a lot faster then a volkswagen golf. More like a wild spin on New Years'...
- bitL 5y ago
  It's not a leaked model, it was a 3D model grabbed from some mobile game...
toss1 5y ago
Seems you mean an attempt at open-source F1 car development... 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

londons_explore 5y ago

Is that limitation to reduce the cost of competing for those who don't have big GPU farms?

mlyle 5y ago
Everyone has tons of resources / big GPU farms / etc in F1. It's one of many limitations to stop the cost to be competitive from going to infinity. Typical contender teams spend $300m/year.
- peteretep 5y ago
  What is a typical team? Biggest teams spend $450m, smallest spend $130m. The resource difference is very real, and the mean hides that.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    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.
    - AnthonBerg 5y ago
      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.
- bhoflack 5y ago
  Since this year the budget cap for the teams is set to $145m/year.
  - dgritsko 5y ago
    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.

berkut 5y ago

Actually, the limit is in TFLOPs, and the use of CFD is audited.

wiz21c 5y ago
How do they actually check the total hours of CPU usage ?
- gripfx 5y ago
  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]. [0] https://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/2021_formula_1_sporting_regulations_-_iss_7_-_2021-03-19.pdf https://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/2021_formula_1_sport...

op03 5y ago

What? How is that even enforced?

mhh__ 5y ago
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.
- avmich 5y ago
  And nobody uses parallel construction?
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    Guessing what you meant here if it wasn’t obvious: 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.
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    The difficulty of policing parallel construction was one of the key arguments against the cost-cap, IIRC.
    - VBprogrammer 5y ago
      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.

quux 5y ago

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.

kalal 5y ago
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.
- pionar 5y ago
  That rule was only implemented this year, so there is no data on that yet.
- BadOakOx 5y ago
  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%) https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.how-f1s-new-sliding-scale-aero-testing-rules-work-and-what-impact-they-will.pn0sG8N4A0cjbNRbdYx8a.html https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.how-f1s-new-slidi...
- mkoubaa 5y ago
  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

cepth 5y ago

In 2017, Ars Technica did a deep dive into computation in Formula 1 (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/04/formula-1-technology/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/04/formula-1-technology/). 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-budget-cap-will-help-even-playing-field/ 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.

Someone 5y ago
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.