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Swimsuit Design Uses Supercomputing

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the go-with-the-flow dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "These days, most competitive swimmers wear some type of body suit to reduce high skin-friction drag from water. And makers of swimwear are already busy working on new models for the Olympics 2008. According to Textile & Apparel, Speedo is even using a supercomputer to refine its designs. Its engineers run Fluent Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program on an SGI Altix system."

1 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Swimmer's Experience by apharmdq · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm a swimmer myself, and when I was younger I trained with the ordinary, plain-vanilla speedos. Lately, our coach has been encouraging the use of the more high-tech suit designs for competitions, so I got ahold of one of those "fastskin" suits that Speedo sells. Surprisingly enough, you can actually feel the difference. (And it shaved a second or two off my times as well.)

    So if Speedo is going through such great lengths to improve their suits, I wouldn't be surprised. I'm just impressed that a suit design can make such a big difference.

    Still, I'm a traditionalist. I don't need no newfangled swimsuits to win a competition! Skinnydipping forever!