AWS HPC tech selected to help Ineos Team UK secure first British victory in the America’s Cup

Going cloud-based

According to the team, swapping out its legacy on-premise HPC infrastructure for AWS’s cloud-based offerings means the Ineos engineering team can run up to 1,200 of these performance simulations a day, which is 20 times more than previously possible.

This, in turn, has sped up the time it takes to refine and improve upon the design of the boats, which could have a potentially huge bearing on the performance of the vessels when on the water, Ineos Team UK’s chief designer, Nick Holroyd, told Computer Weekly.

“The physical lead times to build these things are quite long, and those are all constraints on the design time. And fundamentally, in optimising a piece of engineering, be it boat, a car or whatever, there are two sides to the story that that are really critical to us: one is we need very high fidelity,” he said.

“So we need kind of accurate predictions of how the boat might behave, and the second thing is we need to kind of be able to throw new designs in, and iterate on those and cycle that iteration as quickly as we can.”

And to achieve both these things requires access to large-scale compute resources, which is why the organisation has made AWS its official cloud computing partner, said Holyroyd.

“We need big computers with large memory footprints and multi-core type machines, and we need to be able to scale it out to a very large number of simulations,” he added.

The use of CFD makes is possible for the Ineos engineering team to model the aerodynamics of the boat, while simulating the impact that air and liquid will have on how different parts of the boat will behave in a race environment.

This means the team can test hundreds of possible racing variables, including changes in wind direction to how the material the sails are made out could affect performance, in a very short amount of time.

Being able to this is particularly important for next year’s event following the introduction of a new rule by its organisers that means teams are prohibited from physically testing multiple boats, or boating components, in wind tunnels and water test tanks, for example.

At the same time, the organisation has been limited in the amount of it can spend out on the water due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which means its ability to simulate race conditions has become even more integral to the design of its boats and training schedule of its team, said team principal and skipper former Olympic sailor Sir Ben Ainslie.

“Working with AWS for the first time this year has given us access to more and faster computational resources, which has proven crucial in developing the fastest race boat possible. It has helped the team push ahead as we continue to design and develop our race boat for the America’s Cup,” he added.

It has also put the team in a stronger position to ensure the America’s Cup is brought home to Britain for the first time, added Holroyd. “By leveraging AWS’s virtually unlimited compute power, scalability, and resilience, we believe we’re in a strong position to design the boat that can bring the America’s Cup home to Britain.”