As Published In Special Edition for Linux 2006

The Boat That Linux Built
By John Papageorge

Technology bolsters BMW ORACLE Racing's America's Cup hopes.

Building an 85-foot America's Cup racing yacht depends on a skilled team of designers and an equally dependable operating system. That's why BMW ORACLE Racing Design Coordinator Ian Burns invested in Linux. It provides his team with the efficiency and scalability necessary to process complicated computational solutions, including measuring speed performance against the dynamic forces of water and air.

"The speed of the boat is directly proportionate to how efficient you make the sails and how much you lower the drag of the hull," says Burns, whose team relies on software to design every component of the yacht. "We used clustered computing architecture to process and replicate the millions of elements involved in physically modeling and measuring the water path going over the boat and air flow going over the sails."

With designers working 70-hour weeks, Burns required a self-sufficient OS that would not burden his team. He found Linux easy to set up and even easier to manage. "When Linux is properly loaded onto the machines, it rarely needs supervision," says Burns. "And to us . . . that's like gold."

As competition tightens in the America's Cup, Burns believes that racing teams will increase their use of computational solutions to gain an advantage. "It's likely that the scale of computational clusters necessary to process complete solutions will increase from hundreds to thousands of machines," says Burns. "And that's why Linux' scalability made it our first choice."

Team and Boat Specs
Team name: BMW ORACLE Racing
Yacht club: Golden Gate Yacht Club, San Francisco
CEO & Skipper: Chris Dickson
Design: BMW ORACLE Racing Design Coordinator Ian Burns
Crew: 17, plus one observer
Sail numbers: USA 87, USA 76, USA 71
Nations represented on the team: Argentina, Austria, Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, United States
Construction site: Anacortes, Washington
Time spent constructing the boat: 30,000 man hours
Time spent developing the boat: 1,000 hours of full-scale two-boat testing
Boat's hull length: 24 meters
Boat's hull width: 4 meters
Boat's hull weight: 2 tons
Boat's keel weight: 19 tons
Boat's mast height: 33 meters
Maximum area of:
Mainsail-218 square meters
Headsail-150 square meters
Spinnaker-500 square meters