Another Sweep for British Cycling....

It wasn't that surprising, but still very rewarding to see the British Cycling team clean-up at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards 2008. Our congratulations go to Chris Hoy, David Brailsford, and the whole team who have worked so hard over the years to reap their just rewards in Beijing. The University of Southampton feels so proud to be part of this team, particularly the Wolfson Unit who have spent many, many hours with all of the cyclists in our RJ Mitchell wind tunnel. It's so gratifying to know that we have helped in some way towards this huge success story. It just goes to show how engineering can change lives. Roll-on London 2012!

Windows HPC Server cleared for take-off....

At the I/ITSEC 2008 simulation show we were pleased to be able to show, for the first-time, a Microsoft ESP flight simulator working together with Windows HPC Server 2008 This demo involved a lot of technology to make it work. We used Microsoft ESP as the flight simulator front-end, talking to Windows HPC Server 2008 via a Windows Communication Foundation Broker Node. This new Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) capability is brand new. On the cluster-side we were running an MPI (Message-Passing Interface) based Computational Fluid Dynamics code on 128 cores. In order to transfer data we used the Microsoft Distributed Cache service 'Velocity'. All of this together allowed us to calculate the air flow over a ship interacting with the rotor downwash of a helicopter attempting to land! You can read all about in in our paper here.