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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.'"
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 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!
sudo apt-get install oz-flight-simulator
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
> 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.
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.