Nowadays no one can dream of sports glory without having the aid of advanced technology to tweak one’s game. At the Vancouver Winter Olympics currently taking place in Vancouver, one of the US bobsled teams, named Team Night Train, have employed powerful IBM supercomputers along with specialized fluid dynamics software from Exa Corporation to run computerized simulations that would help them shave off valuable tenths of a second from their finishing times.
They are hoping this would result in the US team winning its first bobsled gold medal since 1948. Previously, bobsled performance simulations were carried out in much more expensive wind tunnels.
Source: PC World.
Fascinating that a computer model comes out being superior to a wind tunnel. The approach with the NASCAR help a few years ago didn’t seem to help much.