You don’t win the Tour de France by riding a bike that normal people acquire at a bike shop. You have custom-made aerodynamic machines, and in the case of Armstrong, his bikes are made by Trek Bicycle Corp, which is based in Waterloo, Wisconsin.
Trek had been using some white box Opteron-based workstations, running both Windows and Linux, to design their bikes. The computer-aided design programs Trek uses are Alias Wavefront and SolidWorks Studio, which run on Windows; and the company also uses computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis programs to test the aerodynamic properties of the bike and rider after the design is done.
In years past, Trek could create several time trial bikes for Armstrong in under four months, but this year, the company only had four weeks. So they had to upgrade, and they talked Hewlett-Packard Co into giving them early access to dual-core versions of the xw9300 Opteron workstation, which could support up to four cores, up to 16 GB of main memory, and most importantly, dual PCI Express x16, high-end video cards for nVidia that would allow for design and simulations to proceed a lot faster than because the xw9300 has what is called the Scalable Link Interface. This SLI feature allows the workstation to drive up to four screens (two per graphics card), or to drive one screen like a very fast video card.
Just as Trek has piggybacked on the success of Armstrong in the Tour, HP is hoping some of the magic rubs off and people will take a look at its Opteron workstations. Jeff Wood, director of worldwide marketing at HP for personal workstations, says companies looking for lots of flops in a box–particularly those in the digital media, engineering, and oil and gas industries–are taking a hard look at the xw9300. HP has a more extensive line of Xeon-based workstations, the xw8200s, and has no plans to offer multiple Opteron models. But at $4,000 to $5,000 for an average Opteron-based machine that beats a Xeon-based machine when it comes to performance, HP might have to rethink that strategy.