Fuzzy Logic: It ain't a Repco, Jack

Ben Mansill is no Nigel, but he still loves his supremo technology.

There's sex wherever you look in Formula 1. Every little curve and corner of an F1 car is sculptured art. It's not hard to stare at one for hours. Or maybe it is. Thinking about one naked is even better. From the arse-end to the stick-out-bit up front, there's stuff packed in that make an F-16 look like a relic from the 1970s. Down the back, the engine is a block of screaming technology that stirs your heart, soul and trousers. Up the front, the Lucky Bloke sits cocooned in carbon fibrement, gripping the horniest peripheral ever ever ever.

It lives in a garage royally festooned with screens of glory. No sci-fi starship bridge comes close to looking as cool as these displays. Incomprehensible yet irresistible graphs rise and fall like a mating chimpanzee. Columns of numbers blur at X times a billion squared.

It is little wonder that tech fans gravitate towards F1. We like the raw meat of V8 Supercars too, because we're not without a primal soul. But F1 is the sharp end of racing, so that's the leg we puppies like to rub up against.

Because the Victorian Government is a big suckarse, we recently ate up our annual 14 million government dollar F1 treat, down the back in the garden state. Thanks Jeff!

Because I'm a freeloading junket whore, I recently enjoyed a visit to the race, chillin with the Williams BMW team. Thanks HP!

Anyone who watches the telecast - the whole all-day thing - will have enjoyed Neals on Wheels' garage explaino-jobs. The 'OMG this is so cool' segment. The big numbers and the deep-inside tidbits. Well, this is the computer version.

Hi, I'm Ben Mansill, and today we're inside (!) the Williams team garage. OMG.

It's damn clean in here. Clean like an Intel clean room. Clean like the toilet at your mum's place. Clean so the gear stays in good working order and impresses sponsors and fanboys like me.

There are two banks of LCD displays, half a dozen in each. They're funky-arse 21' jobs because they don't dick around around in F1. One set of displays is for the Williams engineers, the other for the BMW blokes. Each shows telemetry from the car - up to 200 streams of data at any one time. Everything is measured. E-ver-ey-thing. That data is sent real-time to Williams' headquarters in Grove, UK. While the BMW data is also sent to that company's German HQ.

During a race, the boys on the ground can and do call on the engineers at the head offices for in-depth analysis of the numbers. To keep things efficient across this WAN, only updated information is sent. This is new. Until recently all data was replicated with each send. It's illogical and bandwidth intensive, but the smaller volume of data in days gone by made it a non-issue.

A third display rack is out the front, under the awning at the edge of the race track. That's where F1 team bosses (the correct title for these guys is in fact 'Supremo') get the distilled data, using it to get tactical all over the enemy team's arses. They also watch themselves watching themselves on telly. A Supremo perk.

All this kit is ruggedised. It finds itself in an extreme variety of conditions, and has to handle the bumps and drops of travelling to a new country every couple of weeks. The Williams' blokes reckon that the only failures they had with their gear through the whole 2004 season were two fans that carked it. Ruggedised gear being what it is, which you now know all about thanks to Atomic issue 51, is relatively low tech. Williams' want reliable computers that do the job when asked.

All very nice, but getting there in the first place meant designing a car for the job. And for that, my lovelies, the Williams' F1 designers used a cluster of 96 1.3GHz 64-bit Itaniums with a Quadrics interconnect. Bitchin! While not a true parallel processing supercomputer, the Quadrics cluster makes for easy scalability, should Intel happen to have any spare Itaniums in the inventory... The cluster was used for aerodynamic modelling using Flued Computational Fluid Dynamics, resulting in all the little poke-out-bits you see on any F1 car, which smooth the airflow over an intrinsically unsmooth shape. Crash testing is also simulated, which saves big bucks.

Next time you watch an F1 race and try to imagine the crankshaft spinning at 300 revs a second, spare a thought too for the wonder of computer gear that created it all. Then try and imagine the size of the universe. Same headspin. Same beautiful bigness of supremo power.