Lenovo today announced the installation of a supercomputer for AT&T Williams Formula One team.

The Lenovo Supercomputer is used in the F1 team's tunnel simulation facilities in the UK (video).

The supercomputer is being used for operations in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), performing billions of calculations that simulate airflow around a virtual model of a three-dimensional, on-track racing car.
With a peak performance of eight teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second), the Lenovo supercomputer is four times more powerful than the team’s previous solution. This will enable the team to speed up the process of aerodynamic simulation by approximately 75%.
“Aerodynamics plays a critical role in determining how competitive we are for each of the race circuits we visit,” said Alex Burns, chief operating officer, AT&T Williams. “The optimum balance of downforce and drag varies between different circuits, so the aerodynamics at Monaco -- lots of tight corners with few straights -- are very different from Monza, which has few corners but lots of long straights. The increase in supercomputing power from Lenovo will give us the capability to examine a greater range of design variations between races, which will increase our development rate, bringing more performance to the car sooner.”

I am a bit surprised to see Lenovo delivering Supercomputers. IBM did not sell their supercomputer business to them, just the PC and notebook business. Digging a little deeper, I found that Lenovo is working on Supercomputers since around 2005.

See this video demonstrating the windtunnel simulations of the Lenovo Supercomputer.