A good and bad end to the Formula 1 season

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:41:47 GMT

Yesterday the Formula 1 season finished with quite a nail-biting last 20 seconds, I really thought Felipe Massa had won (even the commentator had started congratulating Massa as well) until Hamilton stole it in the last possible second.

The good news for Formula 1 is that Ferrari has installed a new cluster of Microsoft High Performance Server 2008 (HPC) servers so that they can analyse in real time the data from over 200 sensors on each of their F1 cars. These sensors gather everything from the tyre temperatures, how hard the driver is pressing on a pedal to how much fluid remains in the drivers water bottle! Each lap the F1 car generates over a gigabyte of data, and an entire race will create around a terabyte of data for each car. All this data will now be processed by HPC in real time so that the team can act on the data the moment it arrives.

For those that don’t know what HPC is, it is a special high-end version of Windows Server 2008 that runs as a cluster, where each node processes data in parallel with its peers. As information arrives it is divided up amongst the nodes so that each piece can be simultaneously processed by separate machines, meaning that it can be processed at a far superior rate to ‘normal’ servers. Although obviously it is a little more complicated than I have tried to explain!

Oh, by the way. I said that there was also a bad end to the Formula 1 season… Lewis Hamilton won. Not good news at all for me as I am not a fan; I can’t say that I am particularly proud of his on-and-off track attitude, regardless of whether he is a fellow Brit or not. Next year Fernando Alonso will be king!!!

Confessions of a Microsoft Consultant : HPC

A good and bad end to the Formula 1 season