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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."
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.
Can't wait to see it fire up and have the screen print out: It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
89.999997612?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
Not a typewriter
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
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.
Naturally the stealth bomber's software has to be rewritten for the new platform, in particular the operational flight program (OFP) - the app which lets the ungainly plane fly, rather than lurching out of control as it would without constant computer assistance. (A recent B-2 crash shortly after takeoff at the Pacific island of Guam was caused by a false sensor data feed into the OFP, resulting from an airspeed measuring device being affected by tropical moisture. The duff data fooled the OFP app into wrecking the $2bn bomber - while the pilots were unable to do anything to stop it.)
Brilliant!
The Mothership
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.
You can't handle the truth.
Well, considering they can get Linux to run on a toaster, you'd think that would be a no-brainer...
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.
It's true, if some guy's carrying around a large handgun on his hip, you're less likely to comment on his mullet.
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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.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
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.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Pentium 4 chips and Athlons just get shot out of the sky by heat seeking missiles.
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 "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.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
They should have written all the flight control in Ruby & made it an AJAX web application that runs on Firefox on an iPhone. That would make it zillions of times faster than that old C code & Pentiums, right?
Well, given this http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/LN12-18-98/intel_story.htm was in 1998, and about 10 years of development and testing, I guess we're finally seeing CPU's on the B2's that will actually allow them to fly through some of the massive radiation/electrical crap that they would be generating.
www.christopherlewis.com
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.
Full Tilt
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.
Upgrading the B2 to the 1990s is just keeping a 1980s corporate welfare programme for another decade, even while letting it float a decade behind in technology. I guess someone's got to buy all those old Pentiums, or Intel might go out of business.
--
make install -not war
Well, yeah, it's fine for them to be using old hardware. It seems like it's an embedded system that probably has lots of specific requirements, and they can't afford for there to be a BSOD. So it's only smart to use stuff that has been around for a long time and is known to work without any delays or bugs.
Still, it'd be awesome if you could fly one of these things with a Wiimote while rendering the the outside world with a modern game engine. I bet you're going to ask "What's wrong with the '3D graphics' of real life?" Well, the textures are nice and high-res, but dammit, there aren't enough lens flares.
How are you expecting to Martians to communicate with it, if it doesn't have Bluetooth support, eh? Hadn't thought of that, had you?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Just to point a small detail... flying a B2 is cooler than any computer out there. The large weapons just give you cause to giggle every time the news talks about "tensions". More serious note, all military electronic hardware feels primitive, from the GPS that belongs in an 80s sci-fi flick, to the palm pilot the size of a paperback we use to put crypto in radios, its all old. Reasons: A, beauracracy and change don't mix. B: Blowing the shit out of countries that didn't do anything to us just so we can rebuild them is kinda pricey. C: Ammo is expensive too. D: Our budget is mostly going to expanding a certain moron's oil empire. E: Usr=ID10T.
Never disregard the raw power inherent to stupidity... they call it "dumb luck" for a reason...
Riight, a revolution in physics and technology that would rival quantum mechanics and the USAF is sitting on it and using it to mildly enhance a score of strategic bombers.
Tell me another one!
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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.
You wish to drop the bomb: Cancel or Allow?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Well if it's running on an iphone, at least it'll know which way up it is !
Anyone have an over/under on how many Pentium FPU jokes there will be?
Exactly 24.9999998999997...
:-P
Sorry, but you walked into that one
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F00f
Watch the whole plane crash as its pilots desperately try to reboot the fly-by-wire system.
Frankly, the actual language you use on a project is almost (not quite, but almost) an afterthought compared to the other factors of toolsets and talent pool.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Well, don't forget the Serbs managed to shoot down an F-117 during the showdown with Milosovic, and that was using stuff that was probably equivalent to what the Iraqi's had.*
However, you're not quite correct to the best of my knowledge. Stealth doesn't make things invisible to radar...it makes them harder to see. There's a lot of factors involved, but generally they boil it down into a factor called radar cross section (RCS). This is the size of a typical reflector that would produce the same radar return as the plane in question. A B-52 has a radar cross section the size of...well...a B-52 (not quite actually, but we won't get that deep into it). The B-2, on the other hand, has been said to have a radar cross section of a sparrow. You reduce the radar cross section mainly in two ways: by absorbing the radio wave (materials) or by reflecting it a different direction than straight back (geometry). This means that the way the plane is facing is important, because they're not spheres. If you get an aileron facing flat at a radar, they'll probably see you.
Now remember radar return above. You need enough radar return for the receiver to detect it. As the RCS gets smaller, the return drops, so you need a stronger signal to reflect off it, and/or a more sensitive receiver. A shorter distance means a stronger signal, due to the inverse square law. What the story likely refers to is stealth aircraft passing close enough to British frigates to be detected despite being stealthy.**
* I believe the Air Force concluded the F-117 was shot down by one of several radar-guided missiles fired at it, being guided partially manually, with help from infrared tracking. The F-117 has features to reduce it's infrared signature, too, but I don't think the reduction is as significant in infrared as it is in radar. The Serbs may have gotten enough of a radar return that allowed them to point the missile and let it's infrared seeker lock-on. The F-117's probably also flew riskier routes than a non-stealth aircraft like the F-15E's would take. If it was close enough to the radar, it also might have been possible to shoot it down with a strictly radar-guided missile.
It seems the Serbian military paid attention to both the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi air defenses against the F-117 during Desert Storm, and to the thorough way in which the US focused on destorying those defenses early on, making air supremacy a given only hours after the first bombs fell on Baghdad. They were careful both to protect their radars and missile launchers and to employ alternate detection tools, especially the Mk 1 eyeball. ** The Russians claim they have a technique of finding stealth aircraft by looking for holes in expected radar returns (mountains, etc). That would take extra computer power and it seems to me it would only work effectively on low-altitude aircraft, so it might not be a significant blow to stealth technology. I've also heard some stuff about using two receivers to detect stealth aircraft, but there wasn't enough details to get an idea how it works and how effective it might be.
The standard applied world wide to aircraft avionic software is DO-178B http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B. This standard and related standards are used for civilian and military aircraft systems. The "B" level means that a failure is "Hazardous"
Failure has a large negative impact on safety or performance, or reduces the ability of the crew to operate the plane due to physical distress or a higher workload, or causes serious or fatal injuries among the passengers.
You don't just hack on this kind of software. You have to invest in major amounts of planning, documentation and verification in addition to coding. It takes lots of time, people and money.
It also requires a high degree of professionalism. The people and organizations that do this kind of work are far beyond worrying about the Pentium FDIV bug or a DOS attack against a secure embedded system that will never be on a public network. Anyone on Slashdot who brings up these kinds of issues is only showing that they are clueless and are incapable of achieving the professional level required to do this kind of work.
He said: "The Japanese soldier's duty is to die for his emperor. Our duty is to make sure he does his duty"
IIRC this was in the film, so it must be true.
In the list of systems affected by the processor upgrade, I read FMS, radar, comm, sensors (most likely electronic warfare/countermeasures), weapon system integration, etc.
I remember reading that the on-board computers are absolutely essential to fly the B-2 and to handle the control surfaces. All control surfaces are computer controlled to keep the plane stable (and able to fly).
It is still unclear to me whether the upgrade affects or not flight dynamic systems. Furthermore I'm not sure upgrading the flight dynamic software and hardware would be pertinent, unless stability issues have been observed(plane stability or software stability...or both).
The crash some other slashdoters have pointed out might be a trigger to a major flight dynamic software and hardware update, but if that's the case, TFA is unclear on the extent of that upgrade in this upgrade program.
Uhm. No.
Military/aerospace-grade components are built to an absurdly high standard, and have to be tolerant of extreme physical forces and high levels of electromagnetic radiation.
Take a look at what gets put onto satellites (including ones not built by governments). You'll see a lot of radiation-hardened Pentiums and 486s.
A year or two ago, an amateur satellite got sent up using off-the-shelf components, and many (including those who built it) were astonished when the chips lasted a whole month before finally succumbing.
The military is one area where the government actually wants to succeed, as opposed to the many other agencies that were intentionally set up for failure during the Reagan years.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
As the article mentions, if there is a malfunction of the B2 Spirit's computer system (either in sensors or the system itself) the pilots must eject or be killed. There was a video, not available any more, explaining that the computer is the reason why the airplane doesn't spin out of control and crash. If it goes offline it takes just a few seconds before you're toast. This apparently happened once or twice during early development while they worked out the kinks in the software (sorry, can't find any current proof of this). The only B2 that has crashed (that we know of) crashed due to bad sensor input to the computer (if that is really the truth):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-2_Spirit#Incidents_and_accidents
When you've got a billion dollars flying around at very high speeds, with some nuclear weapons on-board, and a couple of highly-trained pilots... you need to be 100% sure the system doesn't go off-line resulting in a near instant vehicle loss. It is also well known that spacecraft and aircraft use technologies that are actually very advanced, but might appear on the surface as old. The amount of materials research that goes in to these things costs in the multitudes of billions. It is very important the H-bombs drop where they are supposed to, and when. It is very scary, and the only way to test all the moving parts together is to start a nuclear war. As the SysAdmins say: "Not if, but when."
Here are some more details (may be a bit redundant):
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Preliminary_Design_Review_Of_New_B_2_Bomber_Computer_Architecture_Completed_999.html
Today the Air Force released the first photos of the B-2 that crashed in Guam a couple months back. B-2 Stealth Bomber Crash Scene Photos: Exclusive First Look
Excellent article! Look at the timeline;
9:29 am /// Waterlogged /// During a preflight check, the pilot notices three air data sensors are malfunctioning. Unknown to the crew, water in the sensors is skewing the air-pressure readings too high.
9:34 am /// Recalibration /// A ground crewman, using a cockpit keyboard, recalibrates the three waterlogged sensors. The preflight checks continue, and the B-2 taxis to runway Zero-Six-Right (above, top left).
10:29 am /// Boiling Sensors /// Before takeoff, the pilot turns on the sensorsâ(TM) heaters. Water in the sensors evaporates; the readings are now normal, but the earlier fix skews air-pressure data too low.
10:30:12 am /// Slow Start /// The B-2 starts takeoff. The on-board flight computer displays the wrong airspeed, causing the pilot to lift off at 133 knots (153 mph) rather than the required 145 knots.
10:30:50 am /// Auto Override /// The flight computer, relying on bad air-pressure readings, concludes the aircraft is in a nose-low altitude and automatically raises the nose to 30 degrees (top right).
10:31:06 am /// Fiery Ending /// The B-2, going too slowly, with its nose angled too high, stalls. As the airplaneâ(TM)s wing scrapes the runway (bottom left), the pilot and commander safely eject. The B-2 crashes (bottom right).
There you go, HUMAN ERROR!!
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Like NASA the US Military does not jump on the latest and greatest technology for everything and for good reason. Some things they do but not all and not the most critical systems. The older technology has been tried and proven over time which makes it more trustworthy than the 15-year old's Alienwarez Octal Core "gaming" PC down the street. When you are flying your 2-billion dollar bomber aircraft over Baghdad and you don't want it to fall from the sky due to a floating point error that had never been seen because the processor is a year old and engineers rushed it to the production line. When you only have one rocket sending a single rover to Mars and the entire space program's life expectancy is hinging on the success, or failure, of this mission, you don't need a hardware failure of the SATA array because a small amount of cosmic radiation has an adverse effect on this one little chip unique to the controller.
You're insane if you think they're even remotely equivalent. Stealth is clever shapes and clever use of materials, mostly enabled by the vast increase in computing power which made it possible to model the radar characteristics of the aircraft more completely. (This is why the F-117 was shaped like a 1980s-era 3D rendering, all flat polygons and no curves: that was the best the computers of the time could handle.) Stealth has absolutely zero application outside of the military. On the other hand, electrogravitics would be an enormous revolution in fundamental physics as well as in applied technology, and would revolutionize nearly every aspect of our lives in the same way that quantum mechanics has.
It's plausible for an applied technology that has no use outside of the military to stay locked up in black programs for a while. It is utterly implausible for a massive theoretical breakthrough which changes a great deal of known physics to do the same.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
It didn't help that NATO aircraft were flying the same tracks night after night. The Serbian air defense guys picked up on it, and (it is suspected) laid a trap, of sorts. Remember, too, that when the aircraft opens the weapons bay doors, those doors aren't stealthy. The radar signature will bloom significantly while they're open, and they might have gotten one or two good returns during that period. Even something like a screw sticking up, or a door not closing quite all the way, can harm the radar signature.
There are also some reports of spying, like guys with cellphones watching aircraft take off on missions and reporting it, or even someone "inside" with access to the air tasking order.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
The Napoleon scale rates aircraft/spacecraft on the likelihood that they would have enabled him to win the Battle of Waterloo.
B-52: 0
B-2: +6.3
U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701): +3,000,000.5
Death Star (Mk II): +4,000,000
"I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans..." --Wintermute, William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
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.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music