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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 want one! Where can I get myself a sweet flight sim like this?! :-o
Or, I could have bought a 6600, like everybody else.
SECOND POST Yusss.
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
Kangaroos with stinger missiles?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Instead of going with a licensed OS like Windows or VxWorks, they saved tens of dollars. Smart thinking and good use of money in these tough economic times.
It would be nice to see other departments try to realize these types of gains.
I remember what happened last time they built a simulator.
It's a disgrace for to kernel hackers everywhere to have their knowledge and sweat used to run the machine of war.
War is just another profit-making venture for the rich.
I like flight sims. Only games I still play are Falcon 4.0: Allied Force and X-Plane. But If I'm not mistaken, there a professional version of X-plane that's FAA rated. Why not start there?
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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!
Given that air forces seem to be moving to unmanned drone fighters, it seems silly to build a new flight sim for traditional *pilot* training at this stage. I wonder if it's aimed at training remote drone "pilots" instead.
What a delight! Where do I order one? "Bandit on your six, Mate!"
The head article says "virtual words that allow pilots to experience real-world combat situations without leaving the ground"...
The new reality is that most combat pilots in the new air forces around the world will be piloting their aircraft from the ground. Far cheaper and far more effective.
This doesn't mean that simulators are not required. Its just that the difference between simulated combat and real combat may be just what screen you are looking at from your flight station.
The Defence Science and Technology Organisation's (DSTO) Air Operations Simulation Centre in Melbourne creates virtual words that allow pilots to experience real-world combat situations without leaving the ground.
I should be paying all of you for my virtual words I'm typing now.
Screenies or it didn't happen.
I'm a little disappointed the journalists couldn't ask nicely for some in-sim imagery. This thing must be pretty! I presume current generation military flight simulators have amazing detail like volumetric clouds, weather conditions and atmospheric effects that were traditionally the hardest to replicate in the past.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
we get it already Linux is used everywhere for all sorts of computing needs. Why is this news in 2009?
Does it run lin--
Oh wait.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Flight simulators are good and all, but even the most expensive simulators are missing an important element -- gravity force feedback in some form or another. Not only do the controls need to feed back, but the cockpit should too. And when we are talking about military aircraft operations, that kind of simulation is quite likely impossible without putting the pilot into a centrifuge.
On the other hand, if this simulation system were for training people to control unmanned craft, then it's perfect I should think.
Now as for the $1.7m spent? That is an impressively inexpensive system if it matches or beats those that cost $10m or more.
I suppose it's possible, but seems very unlikely...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies) for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.
--Theo de Raadt
http://www.monkey.org/openbsd/archive/source-changes/0105/msg01243.html
Free means free, not "free only if I approve of what you do/look like/think/etc.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Defense against nigger's?
"The Defence Science and Technology Organisation's (DSTO) Air Operations Simulation Centre in Melbourne creates virtual words"
The words include whoosh and zoom.
Since X-Plane runs on Linux at this point, I'd have to say spending 1.7m for a Linux flight sim just makes you fucking retarded.
www.x-plane.com
And before anyone says something stupid, its FAA certified for training and used by several aircraft manufactures for training of pilots, certification of their test pilots, and most importantly, design testing.
Hell Bell uses it to train thier pilots on military prototypes that are too expensive to actually put the pilot in and scaled composites uses it to test their designs and train pilots.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So, does that mean that the Linux community will be getting anything back or is it licenced in a way that we won't be seeing one line of code?
i guess it's a slow news day. 1.7 million in development is nothing in the real world.
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.
"...and uses an open source graphics platform."
Sanity check: NVIDIA's drivers and hardware are not open source.
Australia wants to be free.
Much of the cost is probably the computer hardware, and Logitech force feedback joystick.
It will go up as soon as they swap out the Cessna 172 cockpit.
Useless waste of money, if you ask me .....
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
must be a slow day..
I for one welcome our (sigh) nnnn never mind
What! Do I look like a people person?
Uh, I'm New Here
But does it run on Linux?
Can anybody connected to the project comment on which open-source scene graph library was used?
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
> Air Operations Simulation Centre in Melbourne creates virtual words
Vs. those pesky actual words others use?
Tsk.
> > "Kangaroos with stinger missiles?"
Hardly! To quote Wikipedia: "The FIM-92 Stinger is a personal portable infrared homing surface-to-air missile developed in the United States and entered into service in 1981."
How could you postulate arming a 1946 Australian-designed fighter aircraft, the CAC CA-15, (that never went into production) with a Surface-to-Air shoulder-fired Infantry weapon?
( ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAC_CA-15 )
Oh, and, "although the CA-15 bore a superficial resemblance to the North American Mustang (P-51), the CAC design was not based directly on the US aircraft and had quite different performance objectives and dimensions . . . The sole prototype did not fly until March 4, 1946.[1] The CA-15's overall performance was clearly superior to existing single-engine, propeller-driven fighters. It was also faster than most first generation jet fighters."
Now, if you really meant the Sidewinder Air-to-Air missle . . . .
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
There must be a line to the front door to try that baby out!
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
Today's Air-Combat simulators run efficiently on a single Dual-Core Pentium machine with a good graphics card. Military Simulations barely need more than 5% of CPU time these days (disclaimer: I work in the field as a programmer). Why do they need a cluster of machines to run the simulator?
With respect, the gnu tools do not make up a complete system either and most embedded versions of linux have no gnu tools or gnu C library at all. The GPL is a very fine thing but that is not enough to pretend that it is the operating system of Mr Stallman and the other people in gnu that also left some fine tools behind for others to work on so many years ago. IMHO there is no gnu linux until gnu bring out a distribution (which you would perhaps call an OS), after which they can call it whatever they like.
The gnu/linux thing is simply MIT staffroom politics that escaped into the wider world to stop taunting about how HURD was doing. It's the rather tasteless tradition of taking credit for the work of others made even worse by Mr Stallman's years of saying "Linux? Never heard of it" in every interview. Google LiGnuX from when it all started and you'll see just how silly the justification really is and you should find the gnu newsletters that baldly state that it was done to try to raise the public profile of gnu. It's irrelevant now because gnu has gone. We have the FSF which is a purely political body and we have a pile of independant projects. The prefix now is really just there to advertise Mr Stallman's past glory which is pointless since we've all heard of him by now and nobody else cares.
Linux has had an in here for some years now, due to earlier 64 bit support
We were running 64 bit Windows NT on Alpha chips in 1994. When did Linux first provide 64 bit support?
New Flight simulator not compatible with sound. Australia looks to open source community for help. Everyone looks away and ignores them. More news at 11.
And this has been another installament of Captain Obvious!
How is the fact that a flight simular for whatever government's defense is made of Linux and OpenGL news?
You'd have to be completely out of your mind to pick any other solution. Don't tell me in the US they use Microsoft Windows?
Crikey! look at the size of that linux-based cluster of Opteron servers!
Linux is a platform that is used to host a myriad of defense products. 1.7million is chump change compared to many of what is done on Linux. Linux itself is the operating system for a lot of COTS defense products.
Needless to say that Linux is protecting your borders now.
As much as I hate to inject some reality into this slashdot pissing competition... The RAAF contracted Wormalds International to build the F-111C 1993, which they did under Trusted Irix running on various pieces of SGI hardware using OpenGL and some interesting shared memory technologies for low-latency inter-host communications which fundamentally gave them shared memory clustering. It is almost certain that the code-, data- and object-base built for the F-111C sim is being reused here to a very large extent. Using Linux almost certainly facilitates that reuse, irrespective of whatever other attributes it may bring to the table.
The US Navy's sonar and fire control systems are all moving to Linux as well, this is really just another chip in the bag.
Windows just can't handle the data we have to crunch, AND provide real-time like we need(The last thing you want is explorer.exe locking up when you're trying to hit the fire button on your main guns, eh?)