Aussie Defence Force shifts to Linux
THE AUSTRALIAN Defence Force's latest flight simulator runs on SuSE Linux-based clusters of Opteron servers.
According to IT News, the machine is based at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation's Air Operations Simulation Centre in Melbourne.
The simulation centre creates virtual worlds that allow pilots to experience real-world combat situations without leaving the ground.
Greg Combet, Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science, said the new Linux based facility provides a "far more realistic and immersive experience for pilots and operators" than anything they had to play with before.
According to a spokesman, the simulator uses a cluster of 4-core Opteron 2218 servers with nVidia Quadro FX 5600G graphics cards. The avionics and aerodynamics simulations run on a number of 8-core Opteron systems. The simulator is said to boot in about 30 seconds.
All the nodes are based on the SuSE Linux distribution and are tuned for real-time performance. Apparently this involves using memory locking, real-time scheduling and low-delay communication features in the Linux kernel.
Code to run the visuals was written in OpenGL using commercial and open-source scene graph engines and making "heavy use of OpenGL Shader Language programs" for creating effects such as clouds, smoke and vegetation.
The simulator reportedly displays realistic and accurate aerodynamic and avionics models and is configurable to explore "novel systems and concepts". µ
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Apparently it can almost run crisis on max detail!
J/k, looks like a great toy, wonder if they are having any open days anytime soon, might have to wander down there and take a gander.
"The simulation centre creates virtual words that allow pilots to experience real-world combat situations without leaving the ground."
Virtual Words...wow, and I thought I was smart with my flight sim. Very Powerful system for dictation, bit of an overkill IMHO.
"The simulator is said to boot in about 30 seconds."
My Sinclair Spectrum 48k boots in under 2 seconds ... whats your point?
Mr LowerLower,
does your Sinclair run a military flight simulator creating a virtual world? A killer app boots on a distributed computing system in 30 secs. That's pretty impressive I'd say.
You all realize that we are talking about the same country that can't even set up a DNS server with white/black lists? Right? The chances of them even landing even something fool proof like Ubuntu, much less something useful like Red Hat Server, are pretty slim.
SNARK CITY....
What did they use to use? I've been coding simulation in Unix and/or Linux for 20 years.
Buckley's & Nun for this spatchcockery's more like getting your bunyip outback with Alice Springs' & got the darling pea. Put a little woffle dust on it and it will all come out in the wash.
Dan, I'm pretty sure they were using Unix (Linux) of some type back in 2004 and the description of the hardware setup they used back then seems very similar to the one described here, of course much slower.
Axiomatic, I alwise like to think our (Aussie) defense forces are more than capable, I have had the pleasure to meet a number of RAAF personnel over the years and at least the guys and galls who will be our front line are highly intelligent and capable people, from our ground staff to our fighter pilots, yes they can be a bit immature like all of us but they are very capable people. As for comparing a system for the whole population of Aus to a system that will train 1 individual, well lets' just say your simple black/white list is going to need a lot more through put than a cluster computer generating virtual world. Please remember out black/white list is well a concoction from the Aussie Government that has a political agenda, it needs a lot of technical details added, this system is not politically motivated but need based on the RAAF's needs and has been implemented for this, with the expertise of such a system developing over many years.
Well this is a very interesting article, considering we're confusing the DSTO with the ADF, they are not one and the same. Parts of the ADF use windows (most of it) and parts use unix/linux there is no real shift in any direction, so I guess the title is quite misleading. Windows gets more loving me thinks.
Btw, I was at fishermans bend to look at said simulator a few weeks ago (70 years at the bend), it was pretty awesome, kinda made you dizzy standing next to the helo cockpit. Combet was there too but he wasn't on the tour with us, apparently he got sick once in the simulator.
Good luck if ever going to need uber-scalability.
Then again you can try OpenSolaris (a real UNIX), either x86 or SPARC variants.
Many of us fail to understand the term - the Real UNIX. What is the "real UNIX"?
Is it an AT& derivative or the BSD
derivative ? Or something else?
Does it need to certified by opengroup ?
Yes, SCO is still certified, pls. see
this, http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/xu.htm
I refrain from asking, why there are
BSDs, Linux, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX
and True-64 still out there? because they are there doing some useful work.
We don't want a Messiah like cede
proclaiming the great Opensolaris,
Scott McNealy did that, and then it
was Jonathan Schwartz.
Got the point ? Solaris/OpenSolaris
missed more than 10 years. And Sun
is the only one to be blamed. They
almost choked Solaris-x86 to death.
Yes, it was a an enterprise OS back
then. Now, we have alternatives, Solaris
can be avoided. No need to touch a
Solaris CD/DVD anymore.