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GPS Transitions to New Control System
gsfprez writes "It took us a long time, but the Air Force has finally moved off of the 1970's mainframe GPS control system and is now running on a new Unix-based Control System called AEP — Architecture Evolution Plan. It's important to remember that current GPS satellites are basically solar powered iPod shuffles with atomic clocks that simply playback whatever we upload into them at a precise rate. They don't actually have any idea where they are — its the control system at Schriever Air Force Base that does. The new system will be a lot cheaper to support and modify since Sun stocks things like SATA drives - while digging up Saturday Night Fever-era DASDs isn't simple. AEP will also allow us to be ahead of the curve: we're basically good to go to fly the new IIF birds."
They finally upgraded from 1970s technology to..
..Unix. Oh.
Um.
Yay!!!
More Twoson than Cupertino
will this lead to cheaper GPS units in the future? Will it open up some innovation in the open source market so that we can have high quality software on low cost hardware?
Considering the upkeep on the old system, this new system could pay for itself in no time!
The game.
Just who is this summary aimed at exactly?
"Solar powered iPod shuffles with atomic clocks" ... is that the best metaphor they could come up with?!
how media-friendly can you get, damn....
Why not just say that they are high-precision devices that are coordinated from the ground, and that they updated the ground software to something newer and more maintainable? Why do they have to mention a completely unrelated Apple product?
*sigh*
ìì!
Somebody tell Darl. Apparently somebody still uses Unix.
.. but whatever Zonk started smoking lately, I want some.
Arrr!
DASD - Now there's a term I haven't heard in a long time. I guess that it's relegated to history along with ABEND and EBCDIC.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
I wonder what IBM mainframe they used. If it was an 360/370, couldn't they have just upgraded to a new IBM mainframe and kept the old software, after much much testing?
I applaud them, though, for spending the money to get this done, and get rid of all the legacy crap. It will seriously pay of in the long run, even against just upgrading the hardware. Big Old Companies still using piles of FORTRAN and COBOL should learn from this.
Which release of Unix are they moving to? Would that be an SCO Unix (System V Release 3.2) or SCO UnixWare (System V Release 4) :-)
It's like an iPhone with words on the screen, that's what. Stupid words. Shut up.
--Steve
Please stop stalking me, bro.
So... someone dumps a high yield nuke (more likely a few high yield nukes) on one location and the whole GPS system goes to hell after a few days/weeks? Please tell me this isn't the case. Otherwise someone didn't think their cunning plan all the way through.
We use GPS units to geocache, and accuracy has strangely seemed to have improved over the Summer. For those unfamiliar with GPS receiver tech, the newly available units use fast, parallel processing to greatly improve real-time sat processing. The new receiver chipsets have been problematic to use because they couldn't seem to get enough info and used echoed signals often in effort to increase accuracy. Maybe this update will put more downward bandwidth out there to help the new GPS receivers meet their potential.
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
http://www.mhall119.com
the current system is 70's era. It still uses 9-tracks, DASD units, and something called jovial that no one but old engineers with pants up to their chests have even heard of. The parts are freakish in their weight, their mechanical ways, and how unobtainable and unsupportable most everything about the old system is in 2007.
.... "click to read more"... but i wish for lots of shit... it doesn't make me sad.
The new system is modern. You can buy the machines from Sun today online. The OS is still updated and supported. The parts are commonplace like SATA drives, USB DVD drives, Sun workstations, etc. Unix may not be some newfangled operating system, but i can line up 1000 unix-savvy 30 year old-ish engineers and sysadmins for every one 60 year old-ish engineer that understands how to work with the IBM mainframes and jovial.
The savings comes only to US taxpayers - because its going to be way easier to for "us" (US citizens) to pay for younger engineers that are not all about to retire and younger hardware and software that shouldn't have been retired 20 years ago. "We" (US citizens) can pay less to keep GPS going now. The rest of the world.. well, i can't help you with costs since you've never paid for this thing. I'd just say "thanks" and leave it at that.
the iPod shuffle reference is to the fact that all the shuffle does is get music uploaded into it and play it back... it does *nothing* else. Okay... with that example in your mind... that's the same basic thing that GPS satellites do... "we" (US citizens) upload them with what to playback, and they play it back - and they have a clock to make sure they play it back at the right speed.... they practically do nothing more than that.
yeah, my headline was shortend to save room, but in the end, i had to end-up retyping it here. I wish they would have simply said
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Over twelve hundred distressed calls to 911 service occured around the same time. A common thread is that they were all geeks screaming something about geocaching, their GPS isn't working and they are LOST!
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
it's a joke about Steve Jobs. Laugh, bitches.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
If the legacy crap works, it isn't crap.
Truer words were never spoken.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's a good thing that the big nuclear weapons that they'd use to retaliate with ... don't use GPS.
(Hint: ICBMs and SLBMs use inertial and stellar navigation for this reason.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
After reading the iPod bit, I had to doublecheck to make sure the submission wasn't from you-know-how, but then I realized it both made too much sense and contained too little gobbledygook to be from him.
However, now I'm going to be anxiously watching the firehose for an article announcing Apple's new iDecay line of atomic clocks. These will be far better than the Air Force's because they'll have built in battery packs instead of relying on solar power, and offer touch sensitive screens which will redefine the paradigm of atomic clock interfaces.
A NY Times reporter was going to divulge the location of all backup sync systems for the GPS network. It was going to be published this week, so the govt had to hurry up and complete the system upgrade. The COG plan called for this upgrade to be finished in 2005.
I crashed a descendant of a PDP-11 numerous times. And not on purpose. It was an application that may not particularly have been well-written. Butt It would generally crash at least twice weekly and you just hoped you had saved recently.
It was an RT-11 running the CMX 3600 software.
No BSOD but that's because it was not capable of generating a blue screen. It was green or amber. Take your pick.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
My company does turns the 'frames over every 18-24 months for around $2M. To me at least, it seems like $800M would've kept them on the cutting edge of z/Series tech for oh, say, 400 years?
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
This is by no means a "keep the legacy crap" rant -- systems you can't buy parts for without an unlimited budget should be retired ASAP.
However, I wonder who's handling the conversion for them, or if the Air Force is doing it themselves. I've seen great legacy conversion projects, and been involved in some really awful ones. One problem is just a lack of people who know enough about the "old" system to implement the software in the "new" side. The other, and far worse one is when companies (not militaries, mind you) bring in contractors who know _nothing_ about the hidden surprises in the old system, or nothing about the actual real-world application the computer is supporting.
As long as the system's not running J2EE or outsourced to a bunch of "expert" consultants, I'm guessing we're fine. But there is one key thing that's lost on "modern" IT -- proven systems work. Just because something is new doesn't mean it will work better! This is why I'm glad they stuck with UNIX instead of Linux or Windows.
Side note, how much do you think IBM was charging to maintain that monster??
on whether or not you make enough money to qualify for a tax cut.
Those 40,000 positions could have been re-trained to guard Halliburton convoys! Typical government waste...
Blar.
Great, they spent a ton of money so that -- what, GPS will *work*? It already did!
Upgrading from 1970s technology to Unix? Unix *is* from the 1970s! The whole reason most slashdotters think it's the whole world is because they grew up with it -- i.e. it's "always" been here. OK it's been updated a lot since the old days but so have IBM mainframes. DASDs are SCSI disks these days.
Sorry to rant, I'm just so sick of companies/governments pouring resources into replacing working systems just because the current crop of wet-behind-the-ears CS grads have been trained to snicker at the stuff that has been making everything work like clockwork all these years.
I trust the administrators of the system will make sure the code is robust against the epoch rollover.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The previous system, installed at the Satellite Control Facility, or "Blue Cube" (Onizuka AFB) in Sunnyvale, was physically huge. It was the Technology that Put Men On the Moon: Philco consoles, just like in Apollo Control.
Each time a satellite needed a trajectory adjustment, it took three computers and lots of people. The signal processing was done in something called an Emulated Buffer Controller, which was a transistorized device emulating a previous tube device. The real-time processing was done on one of several UNIVAC 490 series machines from the 1960s, and the trajectory computation was done on a CDC 3800 mainframe from the 1960s.
All this gear was interconnected through big manual patchboards, where, for each satellite pass, people plugged in cables to pass data from the ground station links to the buffer controller to the UNIVAC machine to the CDC machine to the console system.
This operation just drove the satellites, not the payload. The USAF, in a very Air Force way, makes a strong distinction between "driving the bus" and operating the payload. Anything that involved commanding the satellite to move or change orientation went through the Satellite Control Facility. Payloads (GPS, cameras, receivers, etc.) were controlled by the using agencies elsewhere, over separate data links.
The SCF's ground stations had (and still have) large (20 meter) steerable dishes that can communicate with their satellites over a low-bandwidth link regardless of the satellite's orientation, even if it's tumbling. There are about eight ground stations, spaced around the world, and they can track as well as communicate. Once the satellite is properly stabilized and oriented, the wide bandwidth directional links used by the payload come up. Those use smaller ground antennas, so as not to tie up the big tracking dishes.
This was finally phased out in the late 1980s, when control moved to Falcon AFB. Still, during the entire history of the Satellite Control Facility at the Blue Cube, no satellite was ever lost due to an operational error there. That's partly why upgrades were delayed.
The upgrades generally maintained the structure of the system, without doing a complete redesign. (A complete redesign was tried once, in the early 1980s. It flopped.)
(Hint: ICBMs and SLBMs use inertial and stellar navigation for this reason.)
Well, it's not like they have to be very accurate...
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
And you're typing on a computer that was manufactured by your buddies in the "Resistance" in Iraq made out of rocks, dirt and camel shit, right?
AIX 5.3L
In the past I have often wondered why the EU thought they needed a GPS system of their own. Now I know why they made Galileo. Thanks.
The new system is modern. You can buy the machines from Sun today online. The OS is still updated and supported. The parts are commonplace like SATA drives, USB DVD drives, Sun workstations, etc.
The systems I saw were not Suns, they were IBM System p5's running AIX 5.3
My BFF Jill owns one of those. I don't. TISNF.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Just for your info: not a whole lot of camels in iraq. I'm sure your white ass is confusing them with the dirty arabs from saudi arabia. who can tell them apart?
And it better stay that way.
I don't want a tomahawk crashing into my house accidentally because of some ipod/windows update or ACPI issue in the intel firmware, or since a core had to goto a wait state for some multitasking thing. Sometimes too many features bury the original intent.
Technology isn't a hammer looking for any nail.
They use inertial and stellar navigation because you don't need GPS precision to hit strategic (as opposed to tactical) targets. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the newer systems incorporate diffential GPS for no other reason than, "hey, why not? One more position-fixing source isn't going to kill us".
I'm sure they won't get a blue screen of death... :>
(And I'd love to get 1/10th the service call.)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
There's very little information to go by, but chances are if you try to rationalize this particular IT project on the basis of generally accepted accounting principles or business economics you'll quickly go crazy. And actually I'd give you more than 400 years. First of all, you're assuming the best alternative is zero. Of course it isn't; not even close. Then, hardware costs have been declining, both in real and nominal terms, and mainframes are no different in that respect. There's also net present value: you could put $800 million into U.S. Treasuries, draw off $2M per year (never mind every two), and your principle would still increase. In other words, $800 million would buy you an infinite supply of IBM mainframes, forever.
Moreover, there's no reason why the GPS operators would even need their own, separate, siloed infrastructure. They could simply move to any pair (for high availability) of mainframe data centers anywhere within the military establishment, run on a couple LPARs, and get guaranteed, highest service levels. With zero additional operations staff in those data centers. That's what modern mainframes do. (Two is a large and sufficient number of machines for most organizations.) Running your own, separate, siloed, application-specific server infrastructure is extremely expensive and oh-so-1980s.
What's even more ironic is that Sun appears to be winding down its hardware business and just announced a big partnership with IBM, including probable support for Solaris on IBM System z mainframes. Computer processor R&D is expensive, and, much like Boeing and Airbus for airliners, there are only a small handful of companies that look like they'll be able to sustain this gargantuan effort. IBM is certainly one of them.
As a taxpayer I'm angry but unfortunately not surprised.
A redshirt in any other uniform color would die as easy.
No flames about how they should have used Linux instead of Suns? I am reading Slashdot, aren't I?
They are actually surprisingly accurate. Using inertial navigation alone, some of the SLBMs have a Circular Error Probable (CEP) that's less than a few thousand yards.* This is a good thing because it means you can use a smaller warhead while still guaranteeing destruction of a hard target, like an enemy bunker or silo. So even without GPS you can practically pick the city block you'd like to drop that half-megaton onto.
One of the reasons I've heard cited as to why U.S. missiles have usually had relatively small warheads compared to Soviet ones is that the Soviets had poorer guidance systems and made up for it with bigger bombs. Although since START I, the U.S. has actually upped it's SLBMs from 100kt to 475kt, one assumes because they have to spread the warheads across more targets rather than using a larger number of smaller ones.
* Wikipedia claims 380m CEP for the Trident II without using GPS. They do have a 'first strike' GPS-guided mode, which lets them get down to about 90m, again according to Wikipedia.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."