File:Solar Panel Covered Conapy for Cambridge University's Solar Race Car.jpg

English: According to data from Cambridge University Eco Racing team, their race car Endeavour can generate as much as 1.3 kilowatts of power from the sun, from its nearly 65 square feet of silicon solar cells that cover the top of the car, allowing it to reach a top speed of about 75 miles an hour.

Using cutting edge technology, including a super computer, workstation computers and solid state drives donated by Intel, the CUER team redesigned the car that first raced in 2009. The Cambridge team streamline the car’s shape, bringing the drag coefficient down to just 0.17. In comparison, a Porsche 997 has a drag coefficient of 0.28.

Today the team completes computer simulations in a matter of minutes versus 24 hours, as having a supercomputer to help them crunch data-intensive problems like computational fluid dynamics.

“It took eight weeks to design the first version of the car in 2009,” said Emil Hewage, the CUER team manager. “But this year, in a space of about 24 hours, we improved the performance by nearly 10%. That’s because of the HPC cluster that we used in our redesign process.”