Chip Ganassi Racing and Microsoft HPC

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

chipganassiMicrosoft has just cut a press release detailing the latest racing team to utilize high performance computing gear in order to gain a competitive edge.  This time, however, the team does not race in Formula1 and is not based in the EMEA.  Chip Ganassi Racing, most widely known as a competitive NASCAR team, is utilizing Microsoft CCS 2003 and several simulation packages from Stackpole Engineering Services in order to determine the optimal starting configurations for its cars before each race.

With Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, we were able to easily put a solution in place that helps our teams better prepare for race day,” said Mark Paxton, research and development engineering manager for the NASCAR team at Chip Ganassi Racing. “With simulation times reduced from 24 hours to about 30 minutes, we now can run multiple simulations for each race and better tune the situations for each car, track and set of track conditions. Faster simulation times give our car teams more time to rerun simulations if issues arise at the track or expected race-day conditions change.”

He goes on to say:

We’re all about making cars go faster, not building fancy computer systems,” Paxton said. “At first, I thought HPC was only for big companies that can afford multimillion-dollar supercomputers. After we realized that HPC was accessible and affordable, we saw the potential competitive advantage it would bring. My only concerns were that the solution be easy to use and easy to manage, and that we could easily modify the application. Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 enabled us to meet all three requirements.”

For those not familiar with Chip Ganassi Racing, they originally began racing in Indy 18 years ago.  Outside of NASCAR, they also field teams in the Indy Racing League, Indy Pro series and the Rolex Grand-AM series.

For more info, read the full release here.