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Australian Defence Force Builds $1.7m Linux-Based Flight Simulator
scrubl writes "The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has revealed its latest flight simulator runs on SUSE Linux-based clusters of Opteron servers and uses an open source graphics platform. The Defence Science and Technology Organisation's (DSTO) Air Operations Simulation Centre in Melbourne creates virtual worlds that allow pilots to experience real-world combat situations without leaving the ground. The visuals software was written in OpenGL, using commercial and open source scene graph engines and making 'heavy use of OpenGL Shader Language programs.'"
I used to work for L3 Simulation - one of the biggest suppliers of flight simulation gear around the world. We used massive diskless Linux clusters for making flight simulator graphics systems - and have been doing it for maybe 10 years now. We used our own Linux distro, software written in C++ and using OpenGL for graphics with nVidia graphics cards. Pretty much every F16 pilot out there plus most US helicopter pilots train regularly on Linux-based flight simulators.
On a typical system, we'd either use a helmet-mounted display driven by two PC's or a dodecahedral "Simusphere" display with 9 rear-projected pentagonal panels surrounding the cockpit mockup. Each display would be driven by either 1 or 4 PC's with a hardware gizmo that combined four raster displays into a single video projector.
Additional Linux PC's were used to stream graphics data into the graphics PC's - more were used to draw the HUD and ancilliary displays within the plane.
The machines were diskless - booting from a central server over 1GHz ethernet. The reason for leaving off the disks on the 'slave' machines was to improve reliability. When you have 64 PC's - the reliability of all of those hard drives would result in more frequent failures than we could tolerate.
Neat stuff - but hardly new!
Tens of dollars? The last military flight sim I played with cost £20m, which is about $32m (or $38m if we're talking Australian $) at the current exchange rate. Possibly costs have come down a lot since then, but they seem to have saved a lot of money somewhere. It was quite fun to fly - panoramic views through the simulated cockpit windows and hydraulic systems moving it in response to my actions - but it was even more fun to sit in the instructors' chair and add a flight in interceptors just as the pilot was coming up for mid-air refuelling.
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Unmanned aircraft may be getting pretty good at firing missiles at buildings but I speculate that they're pretty far from being able to compare to the abilities of a real pilot in most situations. I'm sure Australia (like the US) coordinates its military to be prepared for a real war against another country as opposed to just the anti-insurgent potshot operations that UAVs are so good at.
Screenshots? How about a torrent!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They didn't use Linux "just because it has zero licensing costs" - they used it because Windows isn't going to give them the real time performance on physics simulations that they wanted, to track every projectile and object within a given area takes power, but also has to be able to give the results instantly.