Analyst: John Barr

Date: 20 Dec 2010

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Austrian beverage company Red Bull owns two Formula One racing teams. One is Scuderia Toro Rosso
(the name is Italian for Team Red Bull). The other is known as Red Bull Racing, an evolution of the team
set up by three-time Formula One champion Jackie Stewart, which he sold to Ford Motor in 1999. Ford
operated the team as Jaguar Racing Formula One for four seasons before selling it to Red Bull. For the
first four seasons, Red Bull Racing's performance was competent but unspectacular, matching the
seventh-place finish that had been achieved under the Jaguar banner. But in 2009, the Red Bull cars
became serious challengers, winning six races and finishing second in the constructors championship.
The team went two steps better in 2010, not only winning the constructors championship, but in winning
the final race of the year in Abu Dhabi, German driver Sebastian Vettel leapfrogged teammate Mark
Weber and Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso to become the youngest driver to be crowned Formula One
champion.

Early Adopter Snapshot

Red Bull Technology is an organization that used to design and build cars for both Red Bull-
owned Formula One teams. Getting around testing restrictions meant that with two teams (using
the same base car), it could effectively do twice the testing. Most organizations don't have the
funding to run two teams, and the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) then tightened
the regulations, forcing each team to design and build its own chassis, so Scuderia Toro Rosso is
now operated independently. Red Bull Technology remains the major supplier to Red Bull
Racing. (Throughout this report, we will refer to both the Formula One team and its technology
arm as 'Red Bull.')

The base of the organization is the Jaguar capability, augmented by the arrival of several
experienced and successful Formula One engineers and significant investment from Red Bull
GmbH, which has enabled the team to triple in size. Why does Red Bull, a drink company, invest
so heavily in Formula One? While that might be a good question to ask the sponsor of an
unsuccessful team, the answer for Red Bull this year is clear. Its cars have been billboards that
fly round the world's best racetracks, generating prime-time TV coverage and column inches that
money couldn't buy on both the front and back pages of newspapers.

An obvious way to increase performance is to throw more money – and more technology – at the
problem. In an effort to constrain spending in Formula One and, thus, keep a larger number of
teams competitive, the FIA has mandated resource restriction. In any week, a team can use a 40
Teraflop/s system for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation runs, or 60 hours of wind
tunnel testing time – or a combination of the two. This puts a strong onus on the team to get the
very best performance out of the limited (but, nevertheless, very significant) compute resource at
its disposal.
Company name
Red Bull Racing
Activities
Formula One race team
Head office
Milton Keynes, UK
Drivers
Sebastian Vettel, Mark Webber
Key suppliers
Platform Computing, Siemens, Ansys
Project
Design, build and race the fastest car on the track

Platform Computing

Sponsorship of a Formula One team by a technology vendor often means little more than offering a large
discount, but the relationship that Red Bull has with its partners is far stronger than that, and its
relationship with Platform Computing is one of the strongest. When Red Bull first looked at job-
scheduling technologies, it considered multiple solutions, including Platform Computing's Load Sharing
Facility (LSF). LSF was recognized as being a great product, but it was ruled out due to cost. Instead,
Red Bull selected another product, a decision it soon regretted because the vendor was not able to
provide the level of support – and very fast problem fixes – that a Formula One team requires.

Red Bull switched to LSF and quickly found that Platform was able to deliver the level of support it sought.
Platform had UK-based engineers who understood the automotive industry, connected Red Bull staff
directly to its development teams to discuss issues and enhancements and was able to fix many
problems quickly. A good example of this collaboration is the way that large jobs are handled. In most
HPC facilities, the job scheduler crams as many jobs as it can onto the cluster, so large jobs can only run
when the system is quiet or when a slot has been reserved. Red Bull's CFD job mix comprises a small
number of very large, high-priority jobs and a large number of smaller, less-urgent jobs. Platform worked
with Red Bull to adapt its scheduling algorithms to support this way of working. Red Bull found that within
a short time after switching to LSF, its job throughput had increased by more than 30%.

Red Bull then looked at other products in Platform's portfolio and discovered many good fits with its
technology and business needs. One of the most costly pieces of the Red Bull HPC stack is the
applications. It is, therefore, very important to maximize application license use. The Platform License
Scheduler is an add-on to LSF that helps to manage and optimize license use. LSF's integration with a
range of third-party applications – including ANSYS, which is also an important partner for Platform –
further optimizes performance. Red Bull uses Platform Analytics to understand resource utilization, which
builds a bridge between the IT group and the CFD team and assists with capacity planning. For example,
a minor change to a data set may increase memory utilization by 50%. The CFD team may not realize
this, or may not think to tell IT. But trends, such as a significant increase in memory use, are identified,
and IT can plan to upgrade systems before performance is killed by memory swapping.

Red Bull has been using a third-party portal but is now moving to the Platform Application Center,
Platform's Web portal for users and administrators. The ease of use for complex application mixes
running on clusters enables new CFD staff to become productive far more quickly than in the past. And
Red Bull says that the Platform Process Manager is the glue that holds the backbone of its environment
together. It connects workflow to job scheduling to resource management – from the portal to meshing to
application solver runs to results post-processing.

Other computer uses

Red Bull also uses HPC systems for structural simulations, with Siemens Teamcenter Engineering, NX
(computer-aided design) and other third-party finite element-analysis tools being the major applications
deployed. The structures team uses Windows, but they submit job requests through a portal, and the jobs
are run on Linux systems without the engineers needing to develop Linux skills. The large CFD cluster
has a number of spare nodes that are used for structures runs when they are not required for CFD runs.
Red Bull has considered using graphics processing units (GPUs), but the performance benefit for CFD is
limited, while it is not yet clear whether GPU performance is included in the FIA's 40Tflop/s cap.
Another interesting use of HPC technology is that the pit lane computers use Monte Carlo simulations
during a race to plan the best strategy for tire changes. This technique is particularly appropriate for the
Monaco Grand Prix. Red Bull has considered the use of cloud-computing resources to run its simulations,
but there are a number of issues that are difficult to resolve. It has tuned its in-house HPC infrastructure
to meet its needs and would suffer degraded performance if it used an external facility. Data set sizes are
large and increasing – 100GB is very common. Transferring files of this size across the Internet would
cause delays to job runs. But most important, Red Bull has designed the fastest Formula One car on the
planet, and the idea of sending detailed specifications over the Internet – even if encrypted – is not
something the team is willing to consider.

The 451 take

Red Bull, like all Formula One teams and their suppliers, is constantly under pressure to deliver, and this
year it did so in spectacular fashion. Unlike many businesses that may have a goal to roll out a new
system or upgrade by the end of the year, during the season, a Formula One team has a deadline every
two weeks – and in some cases every week. Problems encountered during the previous race must be
analyzed and fixed, and changes made to set the car up for the needs of the next track. There is no room
for sentiment, or for carrying a partner that is not adding value to the team. The processors, memory,
networks, applications and the entire HPC stack must be best of breed and tuned to the needs of the
team.