Similar to Formula One (F1), SailGP is another global racing series that leverages high technology and data.
Thousands of sensors are attached to the F50 foiling catamarans and their crew members, generating millions of data points, says Warren Jones, SailGP’s chief technology officer, at a media briefing on the side of Oracle CloudWorld 2022 in Las Vegas.
But unlike F1, each of the nine national teams in SailGP can access all those data for post-race analysis. This helps retain the essence of the sport, as winning depends on how teams interpret those data to enhance their sailing performance on water, instead of how much technology investments they can make.
Jones explains that to deliver those data to teams quickly, SailGP runs its computing environment on the cloud using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) compute and storage, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, and Oracle Stream Analytics.
With OCI, SailGP can analyse more than 240,000 data points collected from 800 sensors on the F50 vessels in a matter of seconds, enabling racing metrics to be streamed to crews in real-time. Sensor data flows off the boats into Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse at an average batch size of 15,000 to 20,000 messages, sent every 500 milliseconds.
The data points collected from SailGP’s catamarans are transferred from the F50 vessels to an Autonomous Data Warehouse via Oracle’s cloud region in London for analysis, all within two-tenths of a second. This is accomplished using a dedicated 1 Gbps Oracle FastConnect link.
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Using cloud-based resources to transfer and analyse data in near real-time helps to reduce cost and enable the league’s events to be more sustainable, says Jones.
SailGP no longer needs to send IT support staff and equipment to races worldwide, contributing to fossil fuel emissions. Instead, it can manage most of the IT work remotely, moving data rapidly using Oracle FastConnect and the Oracle cloud region infrastructure in or near the country where the league is competing.
To further lower its carbon footprint, Jones shares that SailGP is currently developing a sailing simulator that runs on OCI.
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The simulator will use Season 1 data in 2019 and visualisation software to re-create race conditions and scenarios. By doing so, the league’s athletes can use the simulator to improve their skills and performance as well as conduct virtual crashes to practice safety tactics, from anywhere in the world, which reduces the impact from traveling in order to meet.
Besides helping to enhance athletes’ performance, data from the F50 catamarans can also inform teams of anomalies. This enables teams to proactively manage the boat’s moving parts should an issue with a particular component arise before, during, or after a race – resulting in improved performance and savings in time and money.
Additionally, SailGP uses racing metrics and data to power its mobile app, SailGP Insights powered by Oracle, and Liveline, an augmented reality graphics package that gives racing fans more insight into what’s happening on the course.
