Always keen to showcase the capabilities of its public cloud computing platform at its annual re:Invent conference this week in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services Inc. today revealed a new project by existing customer Formula One Group as well as two brand-new customers.

The motorsports company used AWS to help do auto race simulations in order to help inform racing car design. The research effort involved a computational fluid dynamics project that simulated the aerodynamic performance of cars during races and led to some key improvements in their design.

The downforce generated by aerodynamics is one of the most important differentiators of a race car’s performance. F1 cars tend to suffer a loss of downforce in certain situations such as when they’re running close to another vehicle, which makes it difficult for drivers to stay close to an opponent and plan to overtake. For example, a car that’s running one car length behind another loses up to 50% of its downforce.

Computational fluid dynamics, which works by simulating the effect of a liquid or gas on an object, allowed F1 engineers to look more closely at how the aerodynamics of cars interact when racing in close proximity. They ran thousands of simulations to test different designs, and were consequently able to build a car that suffers just a 15% loss of downforce in the same situation, when running just one car length behind another.

The new cars will be introduced in time for the 2021 F1 season, featuring a new bodywork design and front wing shape, simplified suspension, new rear end layout, underfloor tunnels and wheel wake control devices. In addition, the new F1 cars will run on 18-inch wheels with low profile tires for the first time.

F1 said the simulations were made possible thanks to the extensive compute capacity of AWS, involving multiple high performance computing clusters and an array of services, including the Amazon Simple Storage Service for data storage and machine learning tools such as AWS SageMaker to help design and optimize the performance of the cars.

“This project with AWS was one of the most revolutionary in the history of Formula 1 aerodynamics,” said Pat Symonds, chief technical officer of Formula 1. “Nobody designs a car to come in second, but for this CFD project we were looking at how cars perform in the wake of another, as opposed to running in clean air. We have been able to use AWS technologies to understand the incredible aerodynamic complexities associated with multi-car simulations, and are pleased that the results indicate we have made excellent progress towards our aims of closer racing.”

New customers

In related news, Amazon also announced a couple of major new cloud customers. They include Best Western Hotels & Resorts, a subsidiary of Best Western International Inc. that operates more than 4,500 hotels worldwide. Best Western said it’s going “all-in” on Amazon’s cloud, which means it’s moving its entire information technology infrastructure to AWS.

“Best Western Hotels & Resorts will migrate all of its business-critical applications to AWS including its hotel reservation system, customer reward platform, and global contact centers, with plans to complete the migration of these applications from its existing data centers by the end of 2020,” AWS said in a statement.

Best Western said it will use a number of AWS services to improve its operational efficiency, including Amazon Aurora for its primary database needs and Amazon Redshift for data warehousing. This should enable it to increase capacity and enable faster processing of hotel reservations, it said.

Meanwhile, Klarna Bank AB, an online financial services provider based in Sweden, says it has chosen AWS as its “preferred cloud provider,” a term that generally means AWS is the main cloud provider but not necessarily the only one.

Klarna said it plans to use AWS’s infrastructure to launch additional products including an “Open Banking by Klarna” service that will allow online merchants and eCommerce companies to build their own online payment facilities. It will also use machine learning services such as SageMaker to help merchants train and build machine learning models that ca identify and manage risk, predicting credit scores in real time, for example.

“Our collaboration with AWS has helped us to rapidly innovate and create new services and applications that customers want, in a secure and seamless way,” Klarna Chief Technology Officer Koen Koppen said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to leverage AWS’ deep portfolio of cloud services to develop new, flexible payment services that will help consumers maintain full control of their finances and help merchants create frictionless payment solutions.”

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