In the fiercely competitive world of international motorsport, where every millisecond counts, Kinetica has been chosen by Mahindra Racing, currently competing in the electric FIA Formula E Championship, to provide immediate insights from racing car sensor data, essential for success in Formula E racing. Mahindra Racing selected Kinetica as its real-time database for advanced analytics for its unrivaled speed and processing of location-enriched time-series data from sensors encompassing engine, aerodynamics, and tire performance. The faster they can process this data, run complex models, and identify critical issues, the quicker Mahindra Racing’s team can fine-tune their cars’ setups to win races.
Dr. Ruggero Franich, Head of Software Engineering, Mahindra Racing, said, “Kinetica is a well engineered software product that functions as advertised. The craftsmanship of its makers is evident in its function as well as in the confident and effective technical support. We selected Kinetica for speed as data throughput matters to us because the time between car runs can be short and we need to understand what happened during a run before the next one starts. Kinetica’s speed is impressive and it applies even when temporally aligning large time-series samples with different time-bases such as ECU data from a variety of sensors. As databases go, Kinetica might as well have been made for Motorsport.”
Kinetica’s unique ASOF join capability, allowing the correlation of different car sensor readings with offset timestamps across a staggering 8,000 tables of individual sensor reading time-series data feeds, set it apart from competitors and secured the deal. “The Mahindra Formula E Racing team extends its appreciation to all those at Kinetica instrumental in designing and building this powerful feature – it truly rocks,” praised Cameron Maultby, Chief Commercial Officer, Mahindra Racing.
“Kinetica’s ASOF joins offer a seamless solution for merging data from multiple tables, even when timestamps don’t align perfectly,” said Nima Negahban, Cofounder and CEO, Kinetica. “By enabling Mahindra Racing’s team to define intervals for data combination based on close values, we empowered them to gain insights and clarity, even in the absence of precise timestamp matches. Inexact joins also extend this capability to spatial relationships, allowing tables to be linked when objects are within a specified distance of each other. Kinetica paves the way for a more comprehensive understanding of data relationships, so imperative when speed determines winners.”
Mahindra Racing is not only committed to expanding the limits of technology and innovation on the race track, but also to addressing the impact of climate change. It was the first Formula E team to achieve FIA Environmental Accreditation and in October 2020, it was awarded Three-Star accreditation, which is the top level possible and demonstrates excellence and best practice in the area. The team is committed to the FIA Environmental Accreditation program by minimizing its environmental impact and working towards achieving carbon neutrality. Likewise, Kinetica stands out as a trailblazer in this pursuit, particularly in the realm of compute efficiency and energy optimization. By optimizing the processing of data through its use of vectorization, Kinetica radically reduces the number of processors needed to perform intricate analytical tasks. This not only translates to impressive speed and performance gains but also leads to substantial energy cost savings exceeding tenfold for certain customers. With fewer processors in operation, the energy required for power and cooling is significantly reduced, resulting in a notable reduction in the carbon footprint.
Mahindra Racing and Kinetica are already exploring new innovations to incorporate geospatial data sets for in-race track positioning, ensuring that every inch of the circuit is mastered with precision. The next frontier includes assessing edge computing needs to move complex models closer to the data, eliminating the lag associated with data transfer. Kinetica is the only database that can take advantage of edge computing with a GPU. This makes the edge device smaller, lighter, and more powerful, critical for many use cases, like racing. Adding vector search capabilities to quickly retrieve historical data patterns from in-car sensors and gain critical insights in real-time to predict similar data patterns and alter race strategy is also under evaluation.
“The future of motorsport is about to get even faster and smarter with Mahindra Formula E Racing Team working with Kinetica to create new avenues for enhancing performance in Electric Racing,” continued Maultby. “The future of Formula E is not just electric; it’s data-driven, precise and immediate.”
Beyond entertaining racing fans, Mahindra Group, the parent company of Mahindra Racing, views Mahindra Racing as an innovation arm helping to advance electric vehicles of all types across other parts of their business, including luxury vehicles, farming, logistics, renewable energy and more. “As technology innovation advances, we’re able to head in the direction of electric mobility faster and more efficiently than ever before across all of our business lines,” concluded Maultby.
