Big Data on Water

From the Babbage column:

"Two days later when racing resumed on Race Day Five the Oracle boat looked different with a much shorter bowsprit. Other less obvious modifications had also been made both to the foils and the wing, all approved as being within the rules by the race committee. Crunching the vast amount of data collected during races (about 3,000 variables are recorded ten times a second), closely analysing the performance of the rival boat and testing the effectiveness of apparently tiny adjustments on virtual models run through a supercomputer, mathematicians and designers had been working night and day to make the boat faster. And they had."