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Sun workstations help Team McLaren Mercedes in the quest for design perfection

As you would expect from one of the world's best performing Formula One teams, competitive spirit is rife at Team McLaren Mercedes. Ask around and you'll find that everyone, not least the 70-strong team of design and manufacturing engineers, shares the same determination and will to win.

It's this will to win that is also demanded of Sun Microsystems, Team McLaren Mercedes' longstanding Technology Partner. Every day, McLaren's engineers push their Sun™ workstations and supporting systems to the limit as they strive to deliver a car that perfectly balances maximum performance with optimal reliability. The smallest design feat may provide the vehicle with its crucial competitive edge.

Formula One designers and engineers are constantly fighting against time. From the moment when the initial design ideas for a car are conceived to roll out of the new car a few months later, McLaren's workstations are in constant use. Without fail, they must also deliver maximum performance and total reliability, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

And once racing begins, deadlines become even tighter. With a Grand Prix usually held every two weeks, there is no respite from the demands of McLaren's Design Office. The need for analysis, design, simulation and manufacturing just gets greater.

Overcoming the impossible
Scott Bain, a McLaren Design Engineer for the last thirteen years, explains, "Without the reliable, high-performance computer-aided design abilities delivered through our Sun workstations, we would be in an impossible situation. With deadlines approaching fast, we need to be able to perform the necessary analyses and deliver design improvements that will help us win races. Working on pure gut feeling is not good enough these days.

"Our work is relentless. 75% of the car will change throughout the season, mainly consisting of gradual improvements in individual components that make the car faster," says Bain. "Each improvement is made for a reason, and we run dozens of tests on every single component that is changed. In fact, the amount of design work we have to do during the season has quadrupled in the last ten years. As you can imagine, this amounts to an immense amount of computing power delivered in a very short time."

Recently introduced Formula One regulations are also making a great impact on the value of Sun's workstations. The regulations place strict limitations on pre-race track testing and allow only a one-lap qualifier before a Grand Prix race. Virtual testing has thus become even more crucial. Now more than ever, engineers and designers are expected to achieve optimal balance and performance before the car even hits the track.

The engine behind the design team
In the design and manufacturing departments, McLaren's engineers and designers work with 64-bit Sun Blade™ 1000 and 2000 workstations. Except for a few workstations that require additional processing power or memory for specific purposes, all of the workstations are configured identically to maintain a consistent design environment.

McLaren recently received a shipment of newer, faster Sun Blade 2000s as part of its continuous hardware replacement cycle, which ensures that engineers have the latest and best design technology available.

Under the hood of the 64-bit Sun Blade 2000s are typically 1 or 2 GB of RAM and 1.2 GHz of processing power. As a standard, each workstation has a 72 GB disk drive and includes a Sun XVR-500 graphics accelerator, although McLaren's manufacturing and design group is upgrading to the outstanding new XVR-1200 graphics accelerators. The XVR-1200 is Sun's latest high performance 3D graphics card, delivering the peak of graphics performance in a Sun workstation. With the XVR-1200, McLaren engineers expect a 400% improvement in graphics performance.

Scott Bain, design engineer at Team McLaren Mercedes, says, "The Sun Blades are vital time and cost saving tools when it comes to both the design and manufacturing of our vehicles. Their powerful graphics handling ability makes it possible for us not only to digitally design every individual component in the car, but also to piece together each component into a complete vehicle on screen before it is physically manufactured. The Sun Blades are built to handle the demands of the processing-intensive CAD applications we use."

CATIA from Dassault Systemes is the primary CAD application used at Team McLaren Mercedes. As CATIA is such a vital tool for McLaren's engineers, Sun works closely in cooperation with Dassault Systemes to ensure that the Sun Blade workstations provide the best possible platform for the application.

The SunPCi III coprocessor card in the Sun Blades allows a dual Windows NT and UNIX environment in which users can run PC applications natively on their Sun workstations. This PC solution is unique to Sun and extremely beneficial to Team McLaren Mercedes designers. Designers work with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications running on UNIX, but at the same time they need to access documents, such as Microsoft Excel work lists, running on Windows NT. The SunPCi III card allows them to run two monitors connected to the same workstation saving both time and desktop space. The UNIX applications run on one monitor while PC applications run on the other.

It's a new world
Technological developments have completely changed the face of Formula One over the last decade meaning that many things that were impossible are now taken for granted. Just look at the current use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in the aerodynamic analysis of individual components and the car as a whole. CFD allows engineers to test aerodynamic properties before parts are manufactured and exposed to live wind tunnel testing.

Kevin Colburn, team leader of CFD, says, "Looking back 10 years, CFD was near on impossible. Basically, it would have required a mainframe computer that occupied at least one room, and even then it wasn't possible to analyse the entire vehicle. Now, from our workstations and drawing on the power of our Sun Technical Compute Farm (TCF) systems we can analyse the aerodynamic properties of every component in the car as well as the whole car itself - and it only takes about two days in all.

"CFD demands an incredibly high calculation speed and is extremely demanding on computing performance. The Sun TCF does the actual number crunching for the CFD simulation, but the durability and reliability of the Sun Blade workstations provide the ideal front-end graphics platform."

Colburn adds, "The Sun Blades help us to run more sophisticated analyses of the car so we achieve a much higher degree of accuracy. A few years ago, we could only analyse individual car components at a low resolution. We weren't able to accurately analyse the entire car. Now with the Sun Blades, we can analyse at a much higher resolution every individual component as well as the entire car."

Real-time race analysis
Even during actual racing, there is no rest for the Sun workstations. They support the telemetry which allows the race strategists and engineers back at McLaren headquarters to monitor the car's performance in real-time - no matter where in the world the race is being held.

Data is gathered from more than 120 sensors placed throughout the car. In the calm of the garage, away from the tension and bustle of trackside activity, the data is analysed and objective decisions are made about how to optimise the car's performance. Data is then sent back to the car to alter various parameters.

Accessing data across the organization
The Sun Blade workstations also offer essential support in the storage and management of all design and manufacturing data. Data is stored in a specialized database on the engineering and manufacturing department's Sun Fire™ V880 server.

"The design and manufacturing database has become an extremely useful tool for us, so it is important we can access it via our workstations and that the workstations support the database's functionality," explains Scott Bain. "We can view all of a car's components in a kind of graphical tree, where the components are shown in a parent-child relationship. It's really very convenient, especially as the data can be shared by all users.

"In fact, the rest of the McLaren organization is also looking at the way we use this database. We are beginning to use it to manage more types of data, including documentation and race track information. Before long, it will be used for the storage of data throughout the organization."

Raising the bar
Despite the success of Sun workstations at McLaren, the design and manufacturing engineers remain the hardest taskmasters, always demanding even better performance from Sun.

Nicola Hughes explains, "McLaren's engineers are highly sophisticated workstation users and we actually use them to beta test new releases. They really do encourage us to push the boundaries of technology. They tell us the sorts of performance and speed parameters needed to give their work that extra edge, and we strive to deliver technology that surpasses their demands."
Scott Bain shares his impressions of McLaren's partnership with Sun: "For us and Sun, it's a question of constant improvement and attention to detail. We're always demanding more speed and power so we can digitally produce more iterations of each component within the limited time available to us. We push Sun to the nth degree, because the better Sun technology is, the better we can perform ourselves.

"As a result of the support Sun has given us over the years, there have been many groundbreaking projects. For example, we were the first to test and benchmark the Sun Blade workstations, pushing for the levels of performance delivered now. Right now, we are testing Sun's next workstation release, the Sun Blade™ 1500s and 2500s.

"We do keep an eye on general developments in the market, but there is a general consensus among the McLaren engineers that Sun has always maintained itself as leading edge. Even when the rest of the market has had its peaks and troughs, Sun has remained at the top of its field and utterly reliable."

Improving the work environment
In the near future, Team McLaren Mercedes will be consolidating its entire organization into one location, called the McLaren Technology Centre. Even before the center was built, the Sun Blade workstations figured importantly because the work desks were designed with the workstations in mind. In addition to the Sun Blades contributing aesthetically to the work environment, the work desks' specifications take into account the need for easy access to the Sun Blades during routine maintenance.