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The Need for Speed Drives NASCAR’s Richard Childress Racing to the Cloud
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Automotive
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Predictive Quality Analytics
- Process Control & Optimization
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
Richard Childress Racing (RCR) is a successful NASCAR team that designs and builds its race cars from the ground up. Over the past 12 years, RCR has invested significantly in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to develop a deeper understanding of the aerodynamics of their cars, evaluate new aerodynamic concepts, and analyze phenomena not modeled in the wind tunnel. However, CFD is a compute-intensive process, and RCR's on-premises resources were limited. They needed to augment their capacity to build larger models with a resolution high enough to precisely understand the intricate flow details that affect the car’s speed on the track.
About The Customer
Richard Childress Racing (RCR) is a NASCAR team with a 48-year history. The team designs and builds its race cars end-to-end, engineering and machining its own chassis and suspension components, designing and fabricating its own bodies, and testing and building its own engines. RCR has won 17 championships and 200 races and became the first team to win in all three of NASCAR’s top touring series. Today, RCR has eight full-time race teams, over 500 employees, a 40-acre campus, and an engineering staff of over 50, including a dedicated aerodynamics team.
The Solution
RCR turned to Rescale’s ScaleX™ platform for full-car aerodynamic simulation of the vehicle body. The platform allowed RCR to run jobs on 512 cores or more, completing in 10 hours. This gave RCR the ability to run more complex simulations in greater quantity because of the access to a wealth of hardware on the cloud. Additionally, the ability to run jobs instantly without waiting in a queue accelerated their simulations and gave them the agility to debug and run design variations and “what-if” scenarios quickly. RCR plans to automate more simulation with Rescale in order to increase their simulation throughput and streamline the process.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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