Slashdot Mirror
US Navy buys Apple as Linux Platform
Nine Mirrors Turning writes "According to the Register the US Navy has ordered 260 XServe servers running Yellow Dog Linux from Terra Soft Solutions. Terra Soft is the only reseller allowed to resell Apple hardware with a third-party operating system installed. The XServes will be modified by a unnamed third-party and will be running a custom kernel. The XServes are destined for US Navy submarines and will be used for real-time image processing. I do wonder how many will be installed on each sub, though. Are we talking clustering here? I didn't even know the USN was running Linux on front-line ships."
This is not really an unusual task for PPC cpu. A The unusual thing about this news, is that Apple hardware, and not some embedded motherboard is used.
Another major difference between the two is the size; you can stack a lot more XServes than you can Sun machines of similar power (420R, 220R, not to mention the Enterprise 450, which is HUGE) given a fixed amount of space.
It is reasonable to assume that, since these are being put into submarines, space is of a limited quantity, so the reduced physical profile of the XServes may also have played a part in the decision making process.
/*- Mohammed -*/
There's a difference between graphics performance and image processing. Graphics performance refers to how fast the machine/OS can render images on-screen, while image processing generally means doing something mathematical to images from an external source. All that matters for the latter is pure, brute processing power and memory. OS X's fancy GUI is probably unneeded overhead - I doubt these machines will be attached to anything but power and a network.
This space intentionally left blank.
There are lots of reasons that low power consumption on a submarine is a good thing, but the low power consumption isn't really one of them in and of itself. Modern subs use electrolysis to get oxygen for god sakes. Of course, not needing as much cooling, not requiring as much infrastructure, being smaller are all good things.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I guess one of the reasons why they opted for the Xserve over the G5 towers is the fact that two or three Xserve boxes take up less room in a rack than a G5 tower does. A G5 tower probably eats up a bit more power and produces a bit more heat... though that may or may not be a problem for them, but I'm guess size is.
Also having the hard drive or hard drives hot-swappable would be a good thing to reduce down time since it would take less time to swap a failed drive with a good drive in an Xserve than pull out a G4/G5 tower and get a drive out and plugged in.
Images? -- yes, SONAR images. Processing noise into useful information is another good use of Altivec....
computational power/required energy to run (very important in submarines, i assume)
;)
Because god only knows you have to watch power consumption when you're sitting on a nuclear power plant.
I know - this probably has no technical merit - but it is worth noting I would imagine, that nuclear power is abundant and hot - so the power/heat specs of the PC are probably null and void...
Acording to the artical *ahem* the company was contracted to build a custom enclosure for the X-Servers. Nothing I have seen describes these, but they could easially include some sort of silent cooling.
If memory serves, subs run in the 100s of billions of dollars a unit.
Old age is catching up with you. Divide by 100(s). I served on 2 Los Angeles Class submarines. The first, kind of in between 1st and 2nd flight boats, cost a little in excess of US$750 million in 1985 US$. The second, a second flight boat, cost about US$900 million. Ohio class boats, aka Tridents cost about $2.5 billion. B2 bombers cost about US$4 billion. Sans weapons systems.
You've never been in the same room as an XServe have you? HEH.
An XServe has like 9 Blower fans in it and sounds like an old dust buster but louder.
Luckily they are easily muted by being put into sound dampening cabinets which work extremely well. Unfortunately for a submarine those things are rather large too. I wouldnt put it past them to gut the XServes and put them into their own fabricated cases.
I have yet to see a high end silent 1U server Because of the blower situation. Theres nothing silent about blower fans.
One of the key points in the article was that they were running a customized kernal. The original was probably based on Linux. As a result of this, it's probably simpler and cheaper to go with a YDL setup rather than try and reoptimize for BSD.
If they went with Apple's XServe OS X, there is a lot of other stuff in there they would have to contend with that could probably break what they are doing. So rather than spend time working out the differences, they chose the route of, "Go with what you know."
I would agree with an earlier poster, that they are probably leveraging the Altivec Engine to do what they need done.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
As has been noted numerous times before in pretty much every forum available, NT had little to do with it. That's probably not the best article to use as "proof" either - would you believe the technical competency of someone who said "your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the next set of instructions" ?
Whatever faults NT might have had, crashing because a user-space application divides by zero is not one of them. It's pretty obvious from the various descriptions of the incident that whatever software they were using to control everything dropped its bundle because it hadn't been completely debugged (which is, if I'm not mistaken, the whole point of testing it) and couldn't handle a divide-by-zero gracefully. Most likely the program GPF'd and corrupted its on-disk data in the process.
gcc?