Author | Yun Peng
Edit | Desert Shadow
With 10 teams, 20 drivers and 56 laps of fierce competition, a top-level fast and furious F1 battle was staged at the Shanghai Circuit in China, with the broadcast signals of the race flying across the world to cover more than 150 countries, and hundreds of millions of spectators were able to enjoy the feast. The appearance of the host driver Zhou Guanyu attracted a large number of fans, and the number of spectators exceeded 200,000 over the three days of the event.
After five years, the much-anticipated F1 Lenovo China Grand Prix has finally returned to China, which is also the 20th anniversary of F1 China.
Behind this exciting event are many unseen technical challenges. With more than 80,000 bicycle parts, more than 600 employees scattered around the world, a nine-month race schedule spanning five continents, and a huge amount of direct broadcast data of about 500 terabytes per race weekend, you can imagine the difficulty behind the preparation of the race. Formula 1 has also consistently ranked first among the world's three major sporting events.
How to solve this dilemma?F1 has chosen to embrace Chinese technology.
Lenovo's logo is almost everywhere on the track, and Lenovo is the only Chinese high-tech company with 10 top sponsors around the world. Behind the high-quality and smooth viewing experience is the solid support of China's hard-core technology.
The high-definition camera on the roof of the car transmits high-quality footage in real time, and the VR immersive viewing makes us feel like we are on the track. High-performance workstations and the data center behind them are running at breakneck speeds.
From all kinds of intelligent hardware terminals to data centers, from massive data to complex algorithms, while racing drivers are running at extreme speed, Chinese technology giant Lenovo is also using their products and technologies to run at Chinese speed and Chinese quality. As Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo Group, said, the cooperation between the two sides is a "model of the combination of technology and sports".
▲Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo Group, waved the checkered flag at the finals
We can clearly see that Lenovo's products, technologies and services are being tested and recognized by the market in the most demanding scenarios, which will undoubtedly further accelerate the implementation of these solutions in thousands of industries.
1. Spanning 21 countries on five continents, Lenovo's "flying data center" solves global operational problems
Compared to the Olympics and the World Cup, F1 has a slightly smaller audience, but its technical difficulty is the highest among the three events. From the various severe challenges brought about by global operations, to the processing and transmission pressure brought by massive data, to the thoughtful guarantee of the whole chain of services behind it, it can be said that they are interlocking and cannot be lost.
When it comes to the challenging preparation for an F1 race, many people may first think of the technical content of the car itself, but in fact, for the organizers, the challenges brought by global operations are more prominent and urgent.
For example, in the 2024 season, F1 will host 24 races in 40 weeks throughout the year, setting a new record for the number of races held in the new year, spanning five continents, 21 countries, and 10 different time zones, sometimes with a gap of less than a week.
After the race, hundreds of staff needed to pack, relocate, reinstall, and deploy the entire set of equipment needed for the event in less than a week. Therefore, the entire set of equipment provided by Lenovo for the F1 team will follow the F1 team from one site to another, which is a real sense of "flying around the world".
From workstations to storage devices to servers, Lenovo has created a complete arsenal of F1 Media Events Technology Centers at each site, with a highly flexible, repeatable and reliable solution that allows F1 team members to quickly "go to the battlefield" anytime, anywhere.
As Pete Samara, Director of Strategic Technology Ventures at F1, explains, the F1 team is like a "circus" that is always on the go, and their hard work on the solution is high quality and repeatable.
Many people marvel at the fact that F1 can achieve such a high-quality global live broadcast, but behind it is actually Lenovo providing a "mobile data center" that can fly around the world.
In addition, one of the requirements brought about by the high-frequency and high-intensity hosting of races around the world is that the intelligent hardware equipment of F1 races must be able to withstand various extreme environments such as extreme weather conditions such as severe cold, extreme heat, and heavy rain.
During the competition, there was also rainy weather in Shanghai, and the high humidity environment brought challenges to the stable operation of outdoor equipment.
Therefore, strong performance, flexible deployment, convenient maintenance, and all-weather safe and stable operation have become the key requirements for hardware equipment in F1 races. Judging from the real feedback of F1 staff, these challenges are already "commonplace" for all kinds of smart hardware terminal products provided by Lenovo, and these products can be easily handled.
In addition to the "excellent" product itself, the efficient collaboration between products and the collaboration between different teams is inseparable from the ability to solve the "connection" problem.
It is understood that F1 also needs to maintain cross-team collaboration between the track engineer team and the broadcast team at all times, and at the same time support them to work closely with more than 200 colleagues in the UK headquarters in real time.
Behind this, the "Lenovo Device Management" software can help F1 teams more easily implement in-band and out-of-band remote device management, regardless of geographical location. Intelligent monitoring systems such as remote monitoring and preventive maintenance can also provide early warning of potential problems and solve them as soon as they occur. This is key to making F1 event management and operation more professional, convenient, unified and efficient.
For example, the ThinkStation P3 Tiny, a Lenovo mini-workstation placed next to the track, can assist front-line engineers at the trackside in transmitting video data from F1 live streaming and timing systems while being compact and portable, and stably transmit video to teams, FIAs, broadcasters and commentators.
Pete Samara, director of strategic technology ventures at F1, mentioned in an interview that Lenovo's solutions are essential for them to be more productive.
As we all know, the best way to test technical strength is to see the landing effect, whether it is a PC or a server, there are many competitors in the industry, but in F1, the world's top difficulty race, and the solution that has been continuously iteratively optimized, is undoubtedly more convincing and competitive. Lenovo applies these technologies and capabilities to other fields, and even has some "dimensionality reduction strikes", which is also Lenovo's unique advantage.
2. Global flow of 500TB data, one-stop service for the whole life cycle
In addition to the challenges brought by global operations, another core difficulty of F1 racing is the real-time collection, processing, transmission, storage and further mining and operation of massive data, which is inseparable from the support of powerful computing power.
F1 is widely recognized by the industry as "one of the most data-driven sports", and the racing situation is changing rapidly, and in a second, the F1 car may have driven as many as 100 meters, and the data behind this is also massive, and the requirements for collection efficiency and quality are extremely high.
According to statistics, nearly 500 pieces of hardware are installed around the track in F1 every race, including cameras, sensors and other acquisition devices, and only one F1 car can be equipped with up to nine cameras. How to collect and process these data in real time poses a lot of challenges to hardware equipment and computing power.
Lenovo's technology and products can collect and store this data in real time, including gravity when cornering at high speeds, steering angle, braking, how hard the driver presses on the accelerator, and all audio and video from the camera and microphone.
Running an Formula 1 race is a huge and delicate project, from live data collection and editing to final broadcast, every step of the process must be accurate. The F1 live team is also known as the "fastest team in F1".
In order to deliver real-time high-definition footage to the world's more than 700 million fans, the F1 live team has planted 60 kilometres of fibre optics on the track, with around 500TB of data transmitted between the Race Technology Centre on the track and the UK's Media and Technology Centre each race weekend, often with more than 400 hours of live broadcast during the season.
From the stadium to the broadcast center, on the trackside, we can see all kinds of Lenovo smart hardware products working in full swing, from laptops, workstations, tablets to Motorola mobile phones.
Their hardware configuration should be strong enough and the cooling system should be efficient enough to achieve stable data processing capabilities and provide a stable and reliable operating environment for F1 live broadcast.
For example, the Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 edge server can provide high-performance GPU computing power with a small size that is only a little larger than a sheet of A4 paper, so as to solve the problem of computing power demand on the edge side in complex application scenarios and synchronize the performance of drivers in real time.
For scenarios such as scorching sun, sandstorm, vibration, and high humidity on the F1 track, the ThinkSystem SE350 can cope with temperature changes from 0-55°C, and has a dustproof and impact-resistant design.
In the field of smart terminals, Lenovo's ThinkPad laptops, ThinkCentre business desktops, ThinkStation high-performance workstations, ThinkVision professional monitors, Lenovo Tab tablets and moto smartphones cover the entire operation of F1 from the track to the headquarters.
It is worth mentioning that in order to increase the immersion of watching the game, Lenovo has developed a mini-game based on the ThinkReality VRX headset, allowing players to experience the thrill of driving an F1 car in a virtual environment.
As mentioned earlier, the storage problem caused by the massive amount of data was also a major challenge, and the F1 team deployed the Lenovo ThinkSystem DE4000F all-flash storage system directly at the race site. It is understood that the system can provide proven availability and more economical IOPS performance in a space of 2U, with a system response time of less than 100 microseconds and a read bandwidth of 10Gbps.
At the same time, DE4000F supports automatic failover of redundant components and storage management functions, can quickly create snapshot copies and volume copies, and supports asynchronous mirroring to ensure data security to the greatest extent.
It can be seen that the indicators of Lenovo's products and technologies do not stay in the laboratory, but are really trained on the "battlefield", and such a program obviously has unique advantages in the industry.
It is worth mentioning that as a technology giant, Lenovo's solutions for F1 events are not only hardware, but also one of its outstanding advantages.
For example, asset recovery services can help F1 teams develop and implement sustainable technology hardware disposal strategies, offset some of the cost of technology refreshes, and ensure security through safe and secure data destruction. Digital workplace solutions enable F1 employees to work collaboratively globally regardless of time and place.
Due to the tight F1 schedule and short race breaks, F1 teams need to operate in unconventional environments for most of the time, which also poses a challenge to the timeliness of the service. Lenovo will have professional technicians to accompany F1 throughout the process to help F1 build the solution. It is understood that Lenovo's experts will work with F1 engineers to design, deploy and ensure the whole process.
It can be said that the solution provided by Lenovo is a "one-stop" in the true sense, from hardware, software to the whole chain of services, the F1 team not only has a strong performance equipment, but also can really use this set of solutions well, give full play to its excellent ability and support, which is also one of the key advantages of Lenovo's solution.
3. From AI PCs to data centers, responding to technological changes with innovation, veteran Lenovo's technology is going global
It can be seen that behind a wonderful F1 event, various software and hardware black technologies are also eye-catching, and have also become the underlying fundamental guarantee for F1's 700 million fans around the world to obtain a high-quality viewing experience.
And the ability to provide such a solution is not something that can be developed overnight. Lenovo has been working in a wide range of fields for years, from smartphones, AI PCs, tablets, laptops to data center servers, and its long-term large-scale R&D investment has allowed the tech giant to stay at the forefront of today's rapidly evolving technology industry, while keeping its solutions viable and competitive.
In recent years, Lenovo has continued to carry out transformation and transformation, with the help of excellent technology and innovation, Lenovo has not suffered the loss of "slow response of large enterprises", on the contrary, for some new technologies, they have been grasping very tightly, and soon showed the results of the landing.
For example, in the field of AI technology, which has the most rapid technology iteration and fierce competition, Lenovo, as a giant in the traditional PC industry, has also become the first terminal technology manufacturer in China to truly define AI PC.
Usually the drastic changes in the industry will take the lead in impacting the old giants, and Lenovo, as the king of the traditional PC field, has taken the initiative to embrace AI PC and released a series of products, behind this, the excellent technical strength and innovation brought by solid R&D investment is undoubtedly Lenovo's confidence, and it is also the core competitiveness of this technology giant to break through the AI industry.
At the just-concluded Lenovo Innovation Technology Conference on April 18, Lenovo Group showed its core proposition, strategic vision and latest technological achievements based on hybrid AI judgment, and released the new AI species of "Lenovo Xiaotian", a "personal agent", as well as the enterprise agent and Lenovo's heterogeneous intelligent computing platform.
As for how to do a good AI PC, Lenovo once again gave its own new solution. Xiaotian has a built-in personal model, which can interact with us naturally, understand intentions, be good at learning and reflection, and decompose and plan complex tasks. At the hardware level, AI PCs have local heterogeneous computing power that combines CPU, GPU, and NPU, which can build a personal knowledge base and connect to an open AI application ecosystem, while taking into account personal data and privacy security.
Yang Yuanqing said that with these five characteristics, the PC will no longer be a Personal Computer, but an AI Personalized Computer.
Yang Yuanqing emphasized at the conference, "The second half of artificial intelligence must be from technological breakthroughs to the stage of landing applications, which requires us to accumulate user feedback in practical applications, continuously improve and continue to innovate." And at this moment, I think the key word is 'landing'. ”
The successful completion of the F1 race, Lenovo behind the core technical support, is precisely this "practical application" and "landing" of the most direct test, Lenovo's technical strength, has gone global.
It is worth looking forward to Luca Rossi, executive vice president of Lenovo Group and president of the Intelligent Device Business Group (IDG), mentioned at the conference that for Lenovo, AI PC is just the beginning, and they will launch more new devices driven by AI in the future.
Conclusion: The speed of China's technology behind F1, Lenovo All in AI continues to lead the industry
F1 cars have a speed of 100 meters per second, with its unique charm to attract hundreds of millions of fans around the world, and the software and hardware black technology provided by Lenovo behind the wonderful events has become another beautiful landscape, also serving hundreds of millions of users around the world, and has also become the business card of China's science and technology to the world.
As one of the world's three major sports events, the F1 race returned to China after five years, which is undoubtedly a "two-way rush", Lenovo, as a representative enterprise of the world's top technology, has been recognized by the world's top major events, and has also taken advantage of this to move to the center of the world stage, and the F1 team has perfectly landed a wonderful F1 race with the help of Chinese technology.
Perhaps, as Pete Samara, F1's Director of Strategic Technology Ventures, said, the technology in the Chinese market is developing quickly and strongly, and their team looked around the world to find the best partners, and finally chose Lenovo Group, and the cooperation between the two sides is a perfect match between F1's exacting high standards and China's technological strength.
Nowadays, global technology giants and start-ups have poured into the new AI track, and the rapid development of a new round of AI technology revolution represented by large models has also profoundly affected all walks of life. Although they are still exploring and practicing, one thing is clear: continuous R&D investment and excellent technological innovation will always be the source of vitality of technology companies. And in this regard, Lenovo is clearly at the forefront of the industry.