Mobile datacentre pushes Team Lotus up the grid

Portable Dell servers process real-time performance data from Formula 1 cars for trackside mechanics

Team Lotus is hoping a revamp of its trackside and factory IT infrastructure will provide the competitive edge it needs to beat its rivals to the Formula 1 title this season.

Engineers will fly a mobile dataentre to each F1 race, while the new Lotus car has been partly designed and tested using a high-performance computing (HPC) facility at Team Lotus' Norfolk headquarters that provides wind tunnel testing simulation using CPU-intensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology, something many F1 teams, including Marussia Virgin, are using to a greater or lesser degree.

All of Team Lotus' equipment - servers, racks, storage, networking components, workstations and laptops - were provided by Dell, which also pitched in with design and consultancy services, says the team's head of IT, Bill Peters.

"In 2010 we were late to the grid and we had to get all the systems in place between September [2009] and February [that year], which was quite a challenge," says Peters.

"Normally any one of these projects would have taken six months, but we did them all in that timeframe. We needed a one-stop IT shop that we could get as much of the infrastructure as possible from, and after looking at the usual suspects [IBM and HP], found that only Dell could provide it."

A single rack of up to six PowerEdge R710/810 servers with a combined storage capacity of 9TB travels with the team to process and store data fed back from the car in real time during the race.

Similar servers back at the Lotus factory operate on Windows Server 2008, forming an HPC cluster made up of blade and rack servers with 16TB of data housed on EqualLogic iSCSI storage arrays, backed up by APC cooling systems and MGE Galaxy 5000 uninterruptible power supplies.

"We are catching literally gigabytes of data per lap from the car from around 2,000 on-board sensors via telemetry, which we analyse in real time and compare to historical data stored on the servers," said Peters.

Chief race engineer Jody Egginton says his job would be impossible without computers and that any engineer without a workstation or laptop would be of no use in the pits whatsoever.

The team was processing so much data last season that it had to upgrade its client hardware to 64bit architecture half way through due to the sheer scale and complexity of information coming off the car it needed to analyse to find that crucial half-second advantage.

"We never write anything down - all job lists are conveyed via software and we use Skype to communicate," says Egginton.

"If we cannot process the data fast enough that is a huge problem - the driver will quickly report problems and we have to relate that to the data we see coming off the car and back it up with numbers. We could not work through the various scenarios around tyres, brakes, mechanics and act on them the following day using a pencil and calculator."

Team Lotus has other fairly unique requirements in that the servers and workstation PCs could not run spinning disk near F1 cars because the vibrations from vehicle engines would damage them. So it paid extra for the reliability and performance of solid state disk (SSD) storage, which also gives mechanics faster access to the car's data. They also need to provide high capacity storage to house the terabytes of historical data around each component's performance and the various "what if" calculations that are saved for future reference.

"We developed the software quickly but now it has been refined so we can understand specific changes like what effect tyre changes or fuel capacity will have on the final time, or why another team has done what it has," says Egginton.

"We also need to have it stored in a format that is secure as in the secretive world of F1 it is never a good idea to have people able to walk away with all your data."

Team Lotus uses RSA secure login and anti-virus clients for its mobile users, predominantly to access email, personal files and the internet as well as voice over IP (VoIP) software.

Peters says the biggest challenge for the coming year is how to build better redundancy into the system.

"Our biggest fear is a power outage - which we have suffered in the past during a race - and it is essential this year that we carry our own data storage around with us and it gives us the secure analytics availability and continuity that we were without last year," he says.

"We use some cloud services for email continuity - it is very important if we lost power over a weekend that the trackside operation could continue autonomously."