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Linux Desktops Send NASA Rovers to Mars
joestar writes "It's not a secret that Linux has been used at NASA for a long time, and it appears that they have been using it quite extensively on the desktop. From the article: 'At the JPL, it is common to see Red Hat Inc., SuSE or Mandriva Linux running on users' desktops alongside Windows. [...] that's still a lot of Linux on the desktop.' More surprisingly, they seem to be reluctant to use Linux on servers: 'Our personal view is that Linux, period, is only for the desktop. We don't run our main servers on Linux, because there are too many flaws in main Linux kernel.'"
Linux's kernel may be flawed, but the GUI is perfect, right?
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Any organization that manages to screw up metric and imperial on a several billion dollar project has no right to comment on "flaws in the kernel".
It's ironic, isn't it, that most companies and corporations find the exact opposite to be true.
Says something about Nasa, don't it?
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I have also seen Linux being used extensively by NOAA in the last few years for weather data tracking and forecasting. I run a combination of Linux, Mac and one XP PC in my lab at Texas A&M Agriculture Program where we run a network of crop-weather (Crop Weather Program for South Texas) stations and an extensive on-line decision support system for cotton growers along the Texas coastal plains. The servers are Linux along with my desktop and notebook, there are four Macs counting one notebook and one MS XP machine to run a Campbell Scientific application that communicates with the weather stations. If Campbell Scientific were to offer a Linux build of LoggerNet I would not need the XP box at all.
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Brack's team instead runs Sun Solaris 8 for its main servers. He cited the OS's more stable, reliable, and longer lifecycle as one of the key reasons for this deployment.
That's the sentence after the one you are talking about.
They mentioned Windows in the summary, so to head off the "so they use Windows servers over Linux???" comments, TFA said they run Solaris on the servers because they have found it to be more stable, reliable, and have a longer lifecycle. I'm not saying I agree, just clarifying a summary I can see leading to pointless comments.
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There is an aspect about IT at JPL that does not come across in the article. There are something like 5500 employees at JPL and there are roughly 3-4 computers for every employee. Now if you consider that most employees only have one computer, it is more like 6 computers for every scientist or engineer.
This means that we have a diverse and decentralized IT make up. Certain core services are within a particular group. But every engineering group is left to themselves regarding how to apply computer resources to projects. So the group that Brack provides administration for (roughly 200 users I think) exclusively uses Mandriva Linux (and only on workstations). While JPL as a whole uses Red Hat for most installs and JPL as a whole does not have a problem with using Linux for servers. In fact you will find almost every type of server OS represented (yes, even the *BSDs).
Having said that, our relationship with Sun is largely historic. Since JPL is run by CalTech we have always gotten that incredible education pricing on Sun hardware and since it ran so well too it was used A LOT in every sector of IT at JPL. Sun has lost some ground to Wintel, Lintel and Mac OS over the years. But it is still highly respected at JPL and heavily used.
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I work as a sysadmin in Houston for the aerospace company that operates as NASA's prime contractor for ISS. We work very closely with the tech people over at the Johnson Space Center on the Station and Shuttle contracts and perform tasks for them that include large-scale analysis and number crunching (we recently handled the foam debris analysis for STS-114). We use a mix of systems on the back-end, but the breakdown generally is Windows 2000 AS & 2003 Enterprise Server for misc. (non mission-critical) application hosting and e-mail and printers and general office automation stuff, and Solaris or Tru64 or VMS(!) for anything flight- or vehicle-related, and dedicated mainframes for large (or legacy) tasks.
Oh, really?
So explain this guy (www.top500.org).
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But, I have seen many workstations running Linux...
To most people, a workstation is a desktop. "Desktop" itself is a very nebulous term, originally meaning a computer small enough to put on your desktop, but now meaning any client system you directly interact with. You also have the problem of many people using "desktop" to refer to a GUI operating environment. A "workstation" however, comfortably fits into all of the above. Workstations are desktops.
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The biggest issue anyone could have with Linux is that it fucking breaks.
NASA has this dead on. When you're dealing with failures that can cost millions, the 2.6 kernel is simply not reliable enough. Hell, if you're dealing with failures that cost thousands, it's not reliable enough... and most server failures cost at least that much for midsize and larger companies. Downtime is really expensive. And you're entirely likely to have it with 2.6.
We in the open source community have this collective groupthink that Linux is extremely stable. It ISN'T, not anymore. 2.2 was incredibly robust... in my opinion, one of the best pieces of software ever written. 2.4 was problematic but eventually mostly stabilized... it still has occasional issues with unusual hardware combinations, but by and large it's pretty solid. 2.6, on the other hand, has been a complete nightmare from the point of view of pretty much any professional sysadmin. Constant regressions, constant bugfixes, and they won't fucking leave it alone and let it stabilize.
It takes YEARS to shake the bugs out of a piece of software, but they refuse to commit to backporting bugfixes to anything older than a couple of months. They just wave their hands in the air and expect 'the distros' to fix their coding errors, instead of doing it right in the first place. So everyone else has to scramble around and backport bugfixes, or else adopt a pile of new features every couple of months. Then we get the bugfixes for the new code, along with MORE new code, with yet MORE bugs. Rik van Riel has stated, I kid you not, that's he's perfectly okay with only one in three 'stable' kernels actually being, you know, stable.
So of COURSE NASA doesn't use it on servers. Linux is not being written for reliability. It never was, it just happened by accident. It was ALWAYS intended as a desktop Unix, but it was so amazingly robust in its early, simple incarnations, that it was pressed into wide server duty. And instead of realizing why Linux became so popular, the devs seem to have stayed with their desktop orientation... and in fact have changed the development process so it's more fun for them. It's a nightmare for everyone ELSE, but now they don't have to deal with the boring, nasty grunt work of making sure the code actually works in every single case.
I can't find the quote now, but at one time, Linus said something along the lines of "Hardware is inherently stable; there's no reason why software can't be written to the same standard." But he seems to have forgotten that completely. Linux has turned into the Windows of Unix.... lots and lots of features, not so hot on reliability. You KNOW it's a problem when Ars Technica, one of the most competent geek websites anywhere, switched back to Windows for _stability_. The Linux dev team should be completely ashamed of themselves for that one.
I've been using Linux since late 93 or early 94. I put it into real production service in business in '98 or so, and relied on it for years. All we had back then was ext2, which lost data if the box crashed... but it didn't matter much because it never crashed.
That is SO not true anymore.
Most cubicles have a windows machines in addition to the others, that windows machine is the only thing supported by the CONITS contract. JPL mission control is not indicative of all of NASA.
Most developers I work with have Linux desktops and or laptops, some dual boot with windows. System admins around here seem to prefer SGI's, they scarf up many of the used SGI workstations as they get upgraded or bid on pallets of discarded ones. Some have Linux Boxes, and a group of them are using FreeBSD! I had a compact Alpha running Redhat until about 6 Months ago. Now I'm using FC4 on a AMD64 system, and I have a company bought powerbook.
Among the scientists it's about 65% Windows with Linux making up almost all of the rest. Windows Laptops were running almost 100%. But every meeting I see an new Powerbook on the desks. Last Science team meeting I attended had about 5 powerbooks and the same number of windows laptops. I remember 3 years ago I had the only powerbook in the room. Mine is still the only one that dual boots Yellow Dog. It's my uber geek badge ;)
As I recall, I was one of the first there to really kick up a fuss about Linux, and since that time I'm very glad to say that most of the computational fluid dynamics code (ie: the stuff they use to simulate aircraft and jet engines) almost universally supports Linux. Not quite - the stuff for migrating CAD to grids and back isn't Linuxified - but everything else seems to be.
One of my really fun tasks, whilst there, was to migrate FROM Visual Basic to X/Motif. Yeah, sure, Motif wouldn't have been my first choice either, but I got the interface to work many times better under that than it did under VB.
About the only thing I really hated about Nasa Langley was their insistance on using rsh for all network connections (even over the Internet) and their use of
It sounds, from what I'm seeing today and what the article and others are saying, that NASA has largely come out of cryogenic storage and is showing signs of a fully functional intelligence.
Only signs? Sure. Donald Becker (who also worked at NASA) didn't just complain about problems with the network drivers - he wrote his own damn drivers, and it took a very long time for anyone to come close to writing drivers even a fraction as good. Nor did he complain about the lack of clustering capability, he wrote his own - bproc - and the supporting tools that collectively became known as Beowulf.
And the rest of NASA's problem is...? Sure there are bugs in the kernel. And NASA has a small army of programmers fixing inconsequential bugs in old Fortran code that has been in solid use for 20+ years. Let's say that NASA held a 2 month bug-squelching fest. It might still not get Linux to the point where Goddard or JPL were willing to use it on production servers in general, but I'll bet you anything that:
NASA has made a big difference to the software available for Linux (at least, if you're interested in moving objects), and in the distant past made a revolutionary difference to Linux networking. They could make a revolutionary difference again, if they loosened up on the distribution of their Open Source and/or got another Donald Becker to get some critical segment of the kernel working absolutely perfectly. I'm not holding my breath, but there is so much potential there that they'd be foolish to ignore it.
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