B-2 Stealth Bomber Gets Upgrade, Joins the '90s

WmHBlair writes "Flightglobal has a report about the upgrades being made to the B-2A Stealth Bomber, which include Pentium class processors, JOVIAL code rewritten in C, and fibre channel hard drives. The Register, as usual, makes light of this event with a tongue-in-cheek news item noting that the upgrade drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the '90s."

Comments

There's a Reason for That

[hardburn]

While the headline might be good for a light giggle, there's a good reason why it's 10 years behind. Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die. That especially goes for a plane that uses a flying wing design (which are historically hard to stabilize without computer control), and potentially carries nuclear warheads.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[Anonymous Coward]

More than that. Aircraft, especially military aircraft that fly at the altitudes the B2 does, also require "hardened" electronics, capable of handling much larger temperature ranges and higher electro-magnetic interference. That means the processors, while they may be Pentium class, are not Pentium's. They may even use ceramics for the ICs, but either way the new electronics would require a much larger feature size, and therefore less performance than the current cutting edge electronics.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[CheshireCatCO]

Exactly, you beat me to the punch. The same is true in spacecraft components, which is why the computing power and other parts always seem to be so pitiful compared to current technology. (Well, plus the lag between design and actual appearance in space.) Sad, but it's most likely the best way. It's not quite as clear that the military should be quite as far behind as NASA, though.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[NETHED]

The version I heard was that there was water in a sensor that fooled the avionics computer.

Where I got the info
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/06/video-stealth-b.html

Re:There's a Reason for That

[Anonymous Coward]

"pentium class", not pentium. It's actually an ARM processor (better tolerance to heat, radiation, environmental extremes, etc).

Re:There's a Reason for That

[halivar]

No, the GP is correct. As Patton once said (paraphrasing), "the point is not for you to die for your country, but the make the other poor bastard die for his."

Re:There's a Reason for That

[greyhueofdoubt]

Your ideas are all well and good right up until war is not based on tactical ground actions any more. I am in the air force and I agree that our role is ridiculously inflated, but we do play a role. I do not see, however, what would be gained by rolling the air force into the army or vice versa. The AF has lots of ground troops and frankly I don't see them ever because I work on jets. If we were in the same branch, you wouln't ever see me because when I'm in Iraq, I spend most of my time working in the HAS's on our jets or sleeping. If the army took over our c-130 assets, they would belong to an 'army aeronautical division' or something and functionally would very closely resemble the current situation.

Unless your idea is that 11 bravos would fix, fuel, load, and direct their own aircraft. That's not much different from the air force saying that IT ought to just have a private army of its own that understood the strengths and limitations of air power, etc. We do aircraft and airfield security, you guys go outside the wire. That's just the way it is. Aircraft maintainers don't go outside the wire- it's not a place where we're useful. You could train us to be ground troops but that completely negates the advantages of division of skilled labor where you get really good at shooting people and I get really good at keeping jets from falling out of the sky.

And btw the A-10 is not retired. If you can track down a copy of the july-august Airman magazine, A-10s in afghanistan are the cover story. I personally work on f-16s and my base is one of only a few with some very advanced targetting systems and the pilot training to match. I would put our 16s against vanilla a-10s any day for recon and bomb drops. For close-in ground support the army DOES have its own aircraft, they're called ah-64 gunships and they're everywhere in iraq. Those things will end a party like no one's business and that's why YOU HAVE THEM. And so if you want to get mad that your close-in air support sucks, talk to your apache pilots.

Maybe we'll run into each other over there- I'll buy you a NA beer.

-b

Not surprised, even if I am amused

[Duncan Blackthorne]

Having worked for a defense contractor (non-weapons, mind you) for 6 years, it doesn't surprise me at all that the technology for such things are at least 10 years behind state of the art. It takes so long to fully satisfy the requirements of a military contract, then it takes at least as long to fix all the little bugs that inevitably pop up after delivery; then there's the military amending their requirements halfway through the project, sometimes resulting in having to go almost all the way back to square one in the design cycle. Oh, and don't even get me started on requirements that belong in cartoons and comic books, not the real world of engineering.

element of surprise

[roman_mir]

imagine that in the future the enemy (whoever thinks they are the enemy and the others, who are not even aware that they maybe the enemy) will never know when they will get their shit kicked out of them due to a possible Pentium FDIV error or a buffer overflow of some sort. Let's just hope that any security bugs will be dealt with promptly, cause if they can hack into a computer because of some CPU errors by using java or javascript through a browser, the will certainly be looking for a way to control some more exciting equipment.

Re:Security by oldness

[boa]

This is an interesting approach to security, use machines so old that no one can crack. Maybe that's why the Russians still use vacuum tubes in MiGs.

Maybe, or maybe they do it to protect their planes from EMP? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_bomb#Effects

Probably not x86

[Henriok]

It's "Pentium class", not "Pentium". I would bet my money on this comptuer being PowerPC based, probably PowerPC 74xx based, also known as "G4" of Macintosh fame. There are _a_lot_ of PowerPC based avionics, and cutting edge airplanes like Eurofighter, Gripen and F-22 have multiple PowerPC based systems doing all kinds of stuff. When doing embedded electronics for the military you are not going far pitching Intel stuff. You are going to use hardware from manufacturers that can guarantee parts that'll keep being manufactured over many years and are harndened to endure rapid heat, cold, moist and preassure fluctuations. Intel are doing commodity products for low end table environments. Look to manufacturers like Freescale for the stable and durable stuff.

Re:Free of BUGS?

[gbjbaanb]

Are you sure? Software tends to be written by developers, and its the quality of them, their ability to work to quality standards and basically take their time to get it done right that matters. All that C code you've seen crash - it'll be because someone hacked it together, no-one tested it thoroughly enough, and no-one took the time to do it right. C is even easy to code reliably if you impose some restrictions on yourself (or use some libraries/routines that you can't easily take shortcuts with - eg if you can pass a pointer to a routine, you're going to pass a bad one one day, do some wrong arithmentic on it, etc. If you pass a strict fixed-size buffer, then you're much less likely to get an error. Just a simple example).

The point is you can write bad software in any language, the new C# stuff at work crashes all over the place and is slow. The old C code from 1984 is still working fine. Its not these languages that had anything to do with their relative quality.

eg. Spacecraft are written in C, and they've worked better than anyone expected:

The only reason I brought that up is because one of my editors said, Oh look, they have Java on this thing.

Oh, Java. Well, we have Java in the ground system not onboard the spacecraft.

Right. That's what it's starting to sound like.

That's right. Yeah. The spacecraft software is entirely in C.

C? Really? That surprises me a little bit.

Yes. It's entirely in C.

I thought Lockheed Martin was a big ADA shop for this sort of thing.

ADA is used largely in military applications, but JPL at any rate has moved away from ADA. Cassini, I believe, would be the last JPL mission that used ADA. And that was largely due to the success of the Mars Pathfinder in the mid-nineties. And as I said, these missions are to a large extent all derived from Mars Pathfinder.

After that successful mission, you say, Hey, we could do it in C now. That's not as scary as everybody thought?

Yeah. Right.

Re:Don't you mean?

[everett]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

Re:Still Stuck in the 1980s

[Spy Handler]

"The Stealth Bomber's mission is to deliver nuke bombs inside Soviet territory. It's not really that good at anything else. Though it does get used for other missions, since the US needs to justify spending $2.2 BILLION on each one."

It's quite good at dropping large bombloads on places, other than Soviet Union, that are defended by SAMs and radar-guided AAA, and avoid getting shot down.

No other aircraft in the world can do this. F-117 can do the "avoid getting shot down" part, but not the large bombload part.

Re:It was Douglas MacArthur

[rossdee]

The quote from Patton was also in a film: Patton (1970)

"Nobody ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." -- General George S. Patton (George C. Scott)

Re:I hate to break it to anybody

[mrmeval]

Intel allowed the government to have a no-fee license to produce a radiation hardened Pentium chip. The article has some details on radiation hardening.
http://www.sandia.gov/media/rhp.htm

I've built replacement keyboard assemblies for one of the systems on that. Not sure which. It was a rf and fluid gasketed oversized heavy aluminum box. The actual keyboard was made by Cherry. I was so disappointed. It's like finding a Yugo engine in a Corvette. http://www.cherrycorp.com/

Re:There's a (BETTER) Reason for That

[Goldenhawk]

I worked on a Navy jet upgrade about 10 years ago. It was a project to replace an antiquated (read that as "wire-wrap technology") autopilot computer with a brand-new, spiffy, fully digital autopilot computer. Of course, just like the B-2, it had to be a form/fit replacement.

I was shocked when, at the first design review, the contractor said they would be using an 80286 as the CPU. Remember, this is 1995. The 80286 was introduced in 1984. By 1995, the Pentium was the standard. So of course I asked "Why use such an older processor, when a newer one would be much much faster?"

Their answer was essentially one word.

HEAT.

The 286 had perfectly adequate processing power to run the fairly simple algorithms needed for autopilot and related functions, including all the error detection and fault logging, as well as the required 2x of government-mandated growth allowance (you MUST use less than 50% of clock times in your design). Using anything more high-powered would generate more heat (which must be dissipated somewhere in the closed environment), and use more current. On a 1960's era airplane, with Kapton wiring and its risk of insulation fires, and its limited power generation ability, you don't toss in higher heat and power requirements without VERY good reasons.

The result turned out to be perfectly adequate, and a vast improvement over the original design.

Let me toss out another interesting statistic. From what I remember from a recent brief, Boeing is right now delivering upgrades to its commercial airline fleet autopilot/navigation computers with 32Mb of data storage installed for the navigation database. Just 32Mb. That's what you're sitting behind in every Southwest or United or American flight you enjoy. With memory so cheap, why not put more in? Same logic, same ideas: for commericial and military programs, you don't overbuild a device just because you can. You'd better have a REALLY good reason to make a change.

We geeks tend to forget that overclocking and water-cooling and 8Gb RAM and 2-TB hard drives are thousands of times overkill for very many purposes.