Dell Technologies partnered with the McLaren Group at Autodesk University this year to showcase a stimulating example of precision design and manufacturing. Using Dell Precision 7540 Mobile Workstations with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 graphics cards, the design and engineering teams integrated real-time sensor data into prototyping their new McLaren 720S racecar.
New GPUs like the Quadro RTX 4000 (similar to the RTX 5000) GPU include 8GB of GDDR6 memory with up to 416GB/s of bandwidth and 2304 CUDA Cores, which means that engineers and design professionals can create and execute the complicated computational chores needed for real-time design simulation. This GPU also includes 288 multi-precision Turing Tensor Cores. It also gives users up to 57 TFLOPS of deep learning performance. If a design professional is involved with professional-level AI inferencing deployments that require a single slot GPU, this is one of the only available options. There are also 36 Turing RT Cores, which provide up to six Giga Rays per second of real-time ray tracing.
Today’s race car systems involve a lot of sophisticated testing powered by different types of computing. Computing and digital feedback have replaced much of the data that was received by physical testing and modeling in years past. For example, Dell and McLaren used the Dell Precision 7540 workstations to power simulation tools, VR and 3D CAD software. These were used in place of physical prototyping methods like using full clay models, which was the standard practice in the past.
At the Sands Convention Center at Autodesk University, attendees were able to strap on an HTC Vive Pro Eye headset and jump into the McLaren 720S immersive visualization. The HTC Vive Pro Eye has a flip-up display that allows users to see the real world without removing the headset. The new controllers are better than any the company has created so far. Though the headsets were tethered to the Dell Precision 7540 workstations, the real-time ray tracing from the NVIDIA RTX series GPUs allowed users to see how much work goes into designing and manufacturing a cutting-edge racecar.