Hurricane Simulator to Destroy Full Size Building

Anonymous Coward writes "This is a shameless plug, but I thought Slashdot readers might be interested in the hurricane simulator system the company I work for (Cambridge Consultants) helped develop for the University of Western Ontario. The BBC article is light on the kind of technical details Slashdot readers enjoy, so here are some titbits. The servomotors for the 100+ valves are controlled over an IPv4, gigabit Ethernet network connected to an Athlon dual-core AMD64 PC. The entire real-time control system runs on this machine, utilizing well above 90% of each processor core, and roughly 30% of the network capacity. The sampling frequency of the control system places a huge demand on the machine, with about 70,000 context switches taking place every second. Yes, it runs Linux. "

Comments

What about the hurricane?

[Attila the Bun]

BBC article is light on the kind of technical details Slashdot readers enjoy

...but not so light as the Slashdot article. Are you telling me that you've built a hurricane machine capable of destroying a building, and the most interesting part is the office PC which controls it?

This seems not good

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to know what a hurricane does, study the effects of hurricanes. One of the best studies was done after Hurricane Andrew and the results were published in Fine Homebuilding Magazine.

What they found that the building code was pretty good. There were a couple of issues.

The rain of an actual hurricane was responsible for a lot of the destroyed homes. Rain would get up under the shingles and soak the fiberboard sheathing. The sheathing would swell and the roofing staples would then cut into the sheathing and the sheathing would blow off. Once that happened, the house was toast.

Another issue was that builders didn't always build to code. They found a lot of nails that missed the lumber they were aimed at.

This experiment misses a couple of things that caused most of the destruction during Hurricane Andrew.

If you state what winds you want a house to withstand, you can reliably build the house to withstand those winds. I am skeptical that this experiment will turn up anything we didn't already know.

Re:Doubts...

[Ohreally_factor]

I found the article to be pretty fascinating, but I'm really curious as to how they've modeled hurricane winds. The hardware details are pretty mundane, but the algorithms they've used to model a hurricane would be a very interesting subject.