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

I hate to break it to anybody

[Anonymous Coward]

but microprocessors that are designed to handle a nuclear EMP aren't blazing fast. But they are definitely not 90s technology.

I think the B-2 bomber will be fine unless its pilots require the extra computing power to play "punch the monkey" or the South Park Lemmiwinks game.

Re:I hate to break it to anybody

[Nyckname]

I think the B-2 bomber will be fine unless its pilots require the extra computing power to play "punch the monkey" or the South Park Lemmiwinks game.

Hey. It gets boring on twenty hour flights.

Better functionally quaint than gee-whiz and oops

[ScentCone]

As was recently discussed about the current Mars lander mission, it's really just fine if something built to do a very specific job doesn't have support for this week's gamer-friendly video board, a hacked Wii controller, bluetooth, and a dozen USB ports. Hardened, reliable hardware and bug-free seems better than, say, some of the misadventures that some IT-intensive commercial aircraft have suffered over the last few years. It's OK to be one notch less cool when you're flying around with large weapons.

Security by oldness

[Plazmid]

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 they should have stayed in the '60s

[speedtux]

I'm not sure that replacing JOVIAL code with C code is actually progress. If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.

90's IS cutting edge for that stuff.

[deft]

What this article seems to overlook is that they DONT WANT new computers and new operating systems, new languages. They want older, stable, rpedictable, thoroughly vetted technologies.

They dont need a super computer to fly these, but what they do need os to know every quirk, every instability, and already have dealt with it so that NOTHING even remotely suprises them.

Thats why moving to C is a big step.

it may seem silly to us because we run all sorts of new stuff on our computers designed to run many things we may never use; These are VERY purpose built, need very little flexibility outside its designated purpose, and doesnt need to be overdone.

I may buy a PC system anticipating programs down the road that might be expanded, but for an aircraft, missiles, sattelites, even the space shuttle which runs EVRY old code, they just need it to do exactly what it needs too, and if that works fine with 256k, then thats what it will get, as long as its stable as all hell.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[tzhuge]

In this case...

avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people don't die.

So what?

[JesseL]

That just means their development & testing cycle runs about 15 years. That doesn't seem terribly unreasonable given that reliability is paramount for a billion dollar piece of equipment.

I work on brand new industrial controls that are still using Z80 processors.

space shuttle runs on 1970s computers

[peter303]

With one MEGABYTE of ferris-core memory. Five redundant computers. The shuttle prgram was late getting started and they didnt want to changes the software.

"And they made fun of vacuum tube computers in MIGs."

It's not really from the 90's

[eebra82]

Those of you who have read some about Intel's coming Larrabee GPU know that it consists of many Pentium cores. The thing is, these cores aren't as old as one may think.

When the Pentium core became obsolete, Intel gave the technology to the U.S. military, which in turn developed it further and added bug fixes. So it's not really technology from the 90's only, because it has been in development for quite some time.

Additionally, old technology has the advantage of being used so much that virtually everything is known about the chip, including bugs. Therefore, it is much safer to work with such a chip rather than going for the latest Core 2 Duo.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[B3ryllium]

... or the wrong people die.

Re:element of surprise

[toleraen]

Yes, because B-2 pilots surf random links posted on message boards mid flight all the time.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[91degrees]

The other factor is that if a Pentium is fast enough, then there's no need for a faster processor. Real planes don't suffer from frame rate issues.

The laugh's on you

[Tom]

The military isn't "behind" in development - the rest of us are behind in testing and quality.

Yeah, you laugh that they use CPUs an order of magnitude slower than your notebook. But they can't afford a BSOD, a floating-point error or any of the other nonsense that you put up with every day. Their processors might be slower, but I wouldn't bet that - taking all things into account - their total productivity is.

Software quality on the "bleeding edge", where most of us live, is abysmal, and that's putting it very nicely. Regular users are beta-testers, and that's if they're lucky. There is software being sold today that shouldn't qualify as an alpha version. When's the last time you bought a game, just for an extreme example, that did not already have a patch available before the box was on sale the first day?

That's nonsense you can't afford in a billion-dollar plane with nuclear weapons on board.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[AP31R0N]

There was a time when the USAF decided that all air to air fighting would happen via missiles, and so, left out guns in the fighters. Korea showed that to be wrong thinking. While our current conflicts are low intensity and door to door, that doesn't mean that an old school throw down will never happen again. It would be naive to get rid of heavy bombers. Some day we might have an actual war to fight.