Cosworth drives F1 engine rendering with Dell Precision

Dell Precision workstations offer high-performance, power and scalability, and are designed to handle advanced applications for the most demanding professional customers. The Dell Precision portfolio is used by creative experts and engineers alike. Dell customer, Cosworth, provider of high-performance technologies for industries including automotive, marine and aerospace, is a prime example of the extent to which companies executing computationally intensive applications like mechanical rendering rely on Dell’s best-in-class hardware for high-quality image generation.

Cosworth has more than 40 years of experience supplying engines to Formula 1, and currently works alongside four independent teams in the 2010 FIA Formula One Championship. A crucial part of Cosworth’s communications programme is the development of high-quality visualisations of the engines and high-performance electronics that it supplies, which enable Cosworth engineers, customers and fans to see the complex designs in a visually clear and accurate way.

Dell Precision T5500To create these photo-quality digital images, Cosworth worked with Dell and AMD to select a bespoke Dell Precision T5500 workstation system configuration, including two Quad Core Intel Xeon Processors and ATI FirePro v8800 1GB graphics card supporting Eyefinity technology. The workstation hosts 24GB RAM with the option to upscale to 72GB. The T5500 was configured with AMD’s ATI graphics card to specifically address Cosworth’s need to work across three screens – this allows for faster and highly efficient workflow when manipulating 4,000+ components that make up one visualisation of Cosworth’s latest CA2010 engine design.

Yusuf  Brand, Communications and Design Specialist at Cosworth said, “Rendering to such extreme detail takes considerable time and resource. We rely on multiple screens and need powerful graphics cards capable of manipulating complex CAD assemblies with ease whilst maintaining high image quality across these monitors. The Dell Precision T5500 has provided this graphics support alongside immense processing power, which has directly impacted the speed and quality at which we can deliver renderings for use in our communications.”

Here’s a video where Yusuf discusses it in more detail:

The engine visualisations created using the Dell Precision T5500 workstation have met with praise from the media and teams within the F1 paddock. Cosworth has been so impressed with the results that the visualisations will be incorporated into animations and video imagery moving forward.

To see the Dell Precision T5500 and other desktop and mobile workstations in more detail, check out the Dell Precision Workstation image gallery on About Dell.

About the Author: Richard Thwaites