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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.'"
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.
I want one! Where can I get myself a sweet flight sim like this?! :-o
In the Australian Defense Force?
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!
In the Australian Defense Force?
No in the Australian Defence Force
There's still a lot of work for human pilots, and there probably will be for at least another generation. The first UAVs that can handle manned-aircraft combat tasks are just now being deployed, and in many ways they're Not There Yet. Are you suggesting that air forces should stop training pilots now on the assumption that drones will take up the slack?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
sudo apt-get install oz-flight-simulator
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Yes, because remember kids, nothing good has ever come from military funded research. You know, like the internet...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
> What about class warfare? Is it ok by you if I use free software to fight the
> evil of global capitalism?
Of course. What he really wants is a political correctness clause. After all, what if someone were to use Free Software to design a coal-fired power plant? Develop a strain of genetically-engineered wheat? Design an SUV? Manage a bank? Run a "right-wing" political campaign?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That's an Americanism. We're talking about Australia. The summary even spells it Defence, and how could that be wrong!?
Even their website is defence.gov.au...
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.
That's an Americanism. We're talking about Australia. The summary even spells it Defence
Did you not see the WOOOOSH?
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.
Yes. What on Earth has happened to people to make them imagine that this sort of thing is a good idea?
"Free speech should be restricted to things I agree with." "Free software should only be used for things I approve of."
It's just crazy.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
Screenshots? How about a torrent!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Actually we'll be retiring the F-111 next year. We will have a mix of Hornets, Super Hornets and JSF for some time, though.
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.
I'm not at all familiar with X-Plane? but is the FAA-certified version already used in science & industry (i.e. by NASA, Boeing, the NTSB, etc.)? In other words, is it accurate enough to actually simulate meaningful training exercises, like certain types of mechanical/electrical/software malfunctions? Can it accurately simulate jet wash, wind shear, microbursts, etc.? I've seen the multi-million-dolar flight simulators used by NASA and major aerospace companies. They seem to be a lot more robust that anything that could be run on a desktop PC. So I'm just wondering if X-Plane is actually of sufficient quality to be useful for something like crash investigation or military training.
Also, the website mentions extensibility and being able to "hack" the software to do more. Would the military be able to customize the software to add combat training capabilities a military flight sim would no doubt need? A military flight simulator probably has some very specific requirements that you aren't going to find in a consumer product. I'm guessing they probably chose to develop their own flight sim because either it's cheaper than licensing commercial solutions, or there are no available flight sims that fit their need. The short-term costs might be higher, but they would have full control of the source code and be able to tailor it to their specific needs (like integration with classified military systems).
Uh, I'm New Here
http://www.fidelityflight.com/newdefense.htm
The flight simulator pictured was built for the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a P-3 Orion Flight Training Device.
It runs x-plane. Austin Meyers (the author of x-plane) worked with Fidelity Flight Simulation to add unique features required.
I was the acceptance test engineer.
There's still a lot of work for human pilots, and there probably will be for at least another generation. The first UAVs that can handle manned-aircraft combat tasks are just now being deployed, and in many ways they're Not There Yet. Are you suggesting that air forces should stop training pilots now on the assumption that drones will take up the slack?
It's also worth mentioning that current-generation UAVs like the Predator are fully human-controlled by remote.
Related, interesting link: http://www.military.com/news/article/human-error-cited-in-most-uav-crashes.html
The GNU operating system is called HURD. A textbook will help you understand what an OS really is instead of taking the brain dead definition the judge rejected in the Microsoft vs Netscape trial some time ago. Cutting and pasting the text from a guy that is really into redefining words to fit his argument is somewhat of a waste of time and will only impress the newbies.