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The Ancient Computers Powering the Space Race
An anonymous reader writes "Think that the exploration of space is a high tech business? Technology dating back to the Apollo moon landings is still used by Nasa mission control for comms and the 1980s 386 processors that keep the International Space Station aloft."
I thought everyone was aware of this by now. :-/
Given how wonky IT and communication upgrades can be, it makes sense to keep these systems the same for as long as possible. I imagine that after the Shuttle is fully and completely retired, NASA will begin to take a serious look at their aging hardware.
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It's not that simple to just update NASA's technology. Yes, a lot of NASA's computer systems are antiquated, but they've also been vetted and engineered so that all the bugs and kinks have been worked out. They can update the technology, but they'll have to go through the whole process of figuring out where all the bugs are all over again. Unlike buying a buggy desktop application, though, when NASA has a bug, lives and millions of dollars are at stake.
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I'm not sure if it is still the case but for a LONG time 286 processors were the only ones available that had been hardened against cosmic radiation and were rated for space. When you're lobbing people into space, it matters most what works and is proven, not what is fastest or the newest technology.
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Probably the most solid platform too! theres no way i'd trust window 7 to launch a rocket into outta space!
The Ancient Computers Powering the Space Race
From general agreement on the definition of the Space Race:
The Space Race was a mid-to-late twentieth century competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (USA) for supremacy in outer space exploration. The term refers to a specific period in human history, 1957-1975, and does not include subsequent efforts by these or other nations to explore space.
Emphasis mine. As to the 'ancient tech', it's stable and still working so what's the problem? People are bitching about rising taxes not the fact that we are stunting ourselves in exploring space. It's not 1975 anymore, people have moved on to other international penis/rocket/missile envy matches.
In related news, the house fails to agree on a meager NASA funding bill while space tourism continues to progress.
My work here is dung.
I will take my '68 Chevelle over your pimped out Toyota Prius any day of the week.
If the stuff in space is from the seventies, this means it's not running Free and Open Source Software ! Proprietary alert, space stuff doesn't run Linux!
No wit here.
Just because they're using old, outdated equipment doesn't mean that they can't do their job efficiently. I've got a 6 year old Powerbook running Ubuntu 10.04 on a PowerPC G4 and it runs just fine. I think the whole "race to the bottom" in the industry has placed even more fact in the statement "they don't make them like they used to." After all, we've got limitless power and they have limited power. It's probably more efficient to wait on a few processes to complete than have massive power failure because some astronaut tried to play Crysis on his terminal.
Don't fuck with it.
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if the iss needed a hex core phenom with quad sli i'm sure they would get it.
I read a while ago that for space use the older integrated circuits are many times more reliable. On a new high density IC a cosmic ray can knock out a connection track, whereas on older "8-bit" processors you would need thirty or forty hits in the same place.
Why use technology that's overpowered for the job they need? In space, low power consumption is paramount, not the ability to edit and render their "home" movies.
And the B-2 Stealth bomber has the equivalent of an Amiga 1000 running it. What is the point of this article? Critical systems require reliable, proven, hardened hardware, not flakey netbooks.
If they are not the fastest CPUs, who cares? They aren't playing half-life on these systems they are flying space shuttles, and if you can't tell the difference, do not work in the defense or space industries. CPU speed isn't the prevailing factor here, reliablility and a known/proven system is.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
They where clever enough to build the stargates, you morons.
My first engineering job out of college was as an avionics engineer at McDonnell Douglas in 1996. We were designing avionics using a Highly Reliable Industrial (HRIP) M68000 CPU downclocked to a couple of MHz. The reason for this CPU choice was that it did exactly what was required for building an embedded system. Also the M68000 had/has a very long production cycle and would be around for many years to come, which is important if you need spare parts in the future. We used the minimum clock setting required to achieve the required performance and to reduce power consumption and thermal cooling requirements. Modern general-purpose desktop CPUs normally aren't good choices for single-task embedded systems because of their power consumption, short product life spans, and general feature overkill. You do not need a particularly fast CPU to perform basic guidance and control tasks or to run avionics computers. The PowerPC has been adapted for imbedded MILSPEC systems for example and it's about 10 years behind the "state of the art."
Yes, a lot of NASA's computer systems are antiquated ...
Furthermore, I thought the United States was still a bit stymied at how the Russians managed to compete with us in space while severely lacking in the VLSI chips department? There may still be some technologies, improvements and lessons to be learned from The Space Race -- especially from the side that fell apart first.
My work here is dung.
I think a lot of arguments in this /. story apply here as well. Basically, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Good luck to anyone trying to sell "enterprise" stacks like Oracle/Weblogic/Java or SQLserver/.NET to NASA ;-)
When did "high-tech" become synonymous with "has a lot of transistors"?
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I'm not surprised, not at all. The A320 ELAC uses 3 68k chips, and the A320 SEC uses an 80186 and even an 8086 chip. Why? For lots of reasons. Basically, it doesn't require billions of instructions per second, it doesn't need to access gigabytes of memory, and most importantly, they are proven chips that have gone through years of testing, and they are relatively simple. At the time they were complicated, granted, but they were still within reach of severe quality control. Remember the problems Intel had with the Pentium and floating point calculations? Nothing serious, but still... The chip was so complex that problems crept into the design phase, and at 38000 feet, you do not want problems. To cite a fellow Slashdotter above, (thanks tekrat), Critical systems require reliable, proven, hardened hardware, not flakey netbooks. Enough design faults have crept into aeronautical design, so I can only imagine the space sector. NASA used to program everything in 68k because they were reliable, simple, fast enough, and because they had lots of really, really good engineers that knew every single aspect of the chips. Don't get me wrong, I love todays chips, and i7s look sexy, but with a TDP of 130W for the Extreme Edition chips, they just add problems. Running at 3.2GHz, with over a billion transistors, you are just asking for trouble. At those speeds and heat, problems do happen, the system will crash. Ok, not often, but with mission critical systems, just once is enough. Did anyone seriously expect the shuttle to run quad-cores with terabytes of RAM?
The urgent is done, the impossible is on the way, for miracles expect a small delay.
I very much doubt they are susceptible to virii so sounds like a smart move keeping with the old tech.
My car uses 100 year old internal combustion technology.
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It has been 4 + decades since the space program dominated electronics development.
Anyway, by the time any piece of electronics gets radiation hardened and goes through the "soak" - i.e., a few simulated years or decades worth of cycling through heat, usage, etc., plus fixing any uncovered problems, it is by definition not going to be cutting edge.
It's good that space computers are more commonplace, anyway. Viking 1 died because JPL couldn't afford to keep the people who understood the archaic assembly language for the landers in the ramped down extended mission team.
Virtually anything related to space has a huge development cycle. Contract bid to delivery is easily 5+ years. One of the first things you do is source your suppliers so you will never deliver anything state of the art. It'll be at least 5-10 years old. At pretty much the same time you have to also deliver most of your spares for the near or distant future. And there probably is no money in the contract for hardware upgrades. It is what it is until it's replaced.
... much of the flying hardware designs are decades old too - but this is IMO due to so much of it relying on govt funding or govt being a primary customer. It seems that there might be progress on this front, though - with the like of Musk, Bigelow and perhaps even Branson (suborbital now - but it's a good start). Guidance computers do not need to be terribly powerful - they need to be reliable. Witness what happened to the first Ariane 5 launch. It wasn't very long ago that the venerable COSMAC 1802 gave way in space platforms to more recent CPU/MCU designs. While quirky, it was well understood and inherently resistant to radiation upset.
I worked on guidance and control systems for the USAF. When I got the chance to look at the shuttles inertial nav systems, I wasn't really that shocked to see they were basically the same as the systems I was working on that were designed in the '60s and modified only slightly through the '70s. The systems work, and with redundancy provide an incredibly accurate system.
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So far, nobody has brought up the complexity explosion. To make modern processors really sing, requires a lot of work in the compilation phase. That means the instructions the coder writes are not straightforwardly coupled to the instructions on the hardware. If you really want to audit the software you rely on to make sure you don't "Need another seven astronauts" then code review is insufficient; you have to look at the hardware instructions too. That is another thing keeping mission critical paths on older hardware --- older hardware tends to be simpler hardware.
While the article is quite right to highlight the proven, reliable technology in manned space missions, it is a mistake to infer that all space electronics technology used today is from the 70s and 80s. There is a vibrant design community for space electronics and a lot of quite whiz-bang stuff goes up in comms, scientific and recon sats. Someone mentioned the space industry hasn't dominated the electronics business for 40 years. That's true, but there are still niches that are absolutely dominated by space. For example, there are some incredibly high-performance millimeter-wave circuits, amazingly sensitive photodetectors and bolometers, and extremely fast Indium-Phosphide digital circuits (not full-on processors) going up in missions every year. Modern CMOS technology (deep submicron) is inherently radiation-tolerant, so rad hardening isn't as important commercially as it used to be, because there is an acceptable level of risk. Manned missions have a MUCH lower acceptable level of risk so mission planners are loathe to deploy anything new.
Since the older processors and RAM were built with bigger transistors, aren't they safer, i.e. less prone to errors due to cosmic radiation?
Does autopilot systems still use 3-4 386'S?
Don't fix it. Really, except for the aging of some discreet components why should this even be a concern. SO the tech is old? It has been well engineered and proven time and time again.
Man, the article makes it sound like NASA is allergic to tech. There's no reason not to bring up kick ass laptops and other non-essential tech that runs hella fast. But don't fuck with what works. It's kept a lot of NASA problems from becoming NASA disasters. Hyperbole will get you nowhere fast.
...don't fix it!
If NASA systems doesn't require more than 640KB RAM, nobody does.
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What exactly would be gained by replacing all those '386s? Seems to me that the very reason the US "won" the space race was because the engineers did what was necessary but didn't waste time/money by overdoing it. Nowadays, EVERYTHING is WAY overdone, and as a result we can't get anything accomplished. Keep it simple, stupid.
The use of the older chips has many reasons. The items above certainly apply. One the issue of cross talk due to pervasive radiation on newer smaller die chips makes them almost unuseable and certainly not for any critical system. If you write a program to be error proof it will spend all its time correcting errors rather than processing on a newer chip. Secondly you have to consider wether the power should be in the programming or in the chip. If a chip fails you can maybe replace it, though how many times may become an issue. If a program fails it can be reinstalled. Thus the use of a more solidly built and radiation resistant archetecture combined with a program that handles more processing decisions might be safer all around. Untill we work out a way to put a forcefield around a station we will be limited severely in the level of functional current technology we can put up there. I find the concept of space as a friendly place to be at odds with the level of knowledge that we have amassed, admittedly small though it is, i think about space as a place that hates Human life and will take any tiny chance and use it to kill, it becomes easier to acceppt the lower level of technology we use up there. Needless to say, if we can move beyond electricity based computing there might be hope.
It really doesn't take that much processing power to keep the ISS in orbit, the 386 (or a handful of them really) is more than powerful enough to do the job.
There isn't any reason for them to switch to something else, what they have works, it works well, and they've learned EXACTLY how it works in the years they've been using them.
They want reliable and understood hardware. They also need hardware that they know can deal with the harsh environment.
Having dealt with far lower end processors than a 386 for use in UAVs I can safely say that the 386 has far more processing power than needed to do station keeping in orbit, especially since all it needs to do is what its told from the ground anyway, where far larger computers can be used to optimize its flight path in advance and simply uploaded to tell the onboard systems where to go and when.
Its not running Windows, or *BSD or Linux, it doesn't have the cruft and overhead of dealing with all the BS that we expect out of a modern general purpose OS.
It has a plan. It has a purpose.
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I'm curious about how something like this can be possible. Do they have a policy of replacing parts on a schedule so that nothing breaks down? Or is there enough redundancy that when a part fails they can repair it without too much impact? I fix up 30 year old video games and things like capacitors and transistors tend ot fail due to age.
My understanding is the reason for the old hardware lies in the fact that the scale of integration has an effect of the level of interference cosmic particle have on calculations. In other words older processors / electronics are more radiation hardened by design therefore for things like guidance systems that calculate reentry trajectories errors mean life and death.
And I thought it was centrifugal force.
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Damn right - I'd rather be using a chip that has a 20-year errata and proven silicon revision than ANYTHING produced in the last five years. Every single processor ever made has errata and when you're talking about a sole life support for the astronauts, damn right it should be from the "old, tried, tested, we know all it's quirks" bin than the local Intel shop.
People never understand this, and I can't understand why. If you tell me that my car's airbags runs on a Dual-core processor, I will be extremely worried for several reasons (unnecessary amount of state-of-the-art technology, unnecessary complications with timing, unnecessary amount of power to do a simple job, etc.) but tell me that it uses a Pentium with an FDIV bug, or even a Z80 with uncorrected "Z80A" original silicon and I'll feel as safe as houses.
Bugs take a while to find. Every extra transistor makes bugs more likely. Every day in ordinary production use makes bugs less likely (because you'll experience them and work around them). And if you NEED 2GHz of processor to do some of these tasks, the astronauts are stuff if their machine ever breaks. If you keep things simple, so that you CAN go to human/paper backup like some of the moon missions did, then you have much less to worry about. Plus the cost is cheaper of course.
It worries me EVERY time I see some modern, state-of-the-art revamp of a critical system (air-traffic control, road traffic signalling, in-car braking systems, etc.)
How much processing power does a spacecraft need anyway? It's not like these CPUs are burdened with the overhead of running a desktop OS. These things are completely dedicated to number crunching on whatever task they've been assigned to. And power draw and heat are probably minor issues compared to more current processors. Chances are anything more current will simply be overpowered for the job.
And given how long it takes to design and build a spacecraft by the time that vehicle is actually being used, the computer hardware inside it will be considered outdated from the perspective of the average consumer. But then, we're dealing with the iPhone generation here, where technological advancement is dictated by yearly, incremental updates and how pretty a product looks. I get the feeling they love gloating about how awesome their cute portable devices are with no appreciation whatsoever of what it took to get technology to its current state.
Here's a link to the print version of the article, so that you don't have to click 'next' six or seven times... http://www.silicon.com/management/public-sector/2010/09/25/space-exploration-the-computers-that-power-mans-conquest-of-the-stars-39746245/print/
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I've often said that we should just put a 5 year stop to all new language and framework development and just spend the time fixing what we have already. A new language is far less useful than a fix for an existing, widely-used language.
When I hear about yet another stack doing something for which we've had solutions for years, I just get tired. Java is the poster child for this insanity. I sometimes think there are more Java frameworks than there are enterprise applications successfully delivered, but less than failed Java enterprise projects.
Robust, hardened, bug-free software is far more appealing to me than "new, shiny, and fragile." But then I just turned 40. Get off my lawn.
One assumes that these computers are not being used for realistic, realtime, interactive, 3D, high-def, surround-sound, audio / video, while trying to keep Facebook pages up-to-date, and scroll an RSS feed along the bottom of the screen. If they are designed for a specific set of functions that are unlikely to radically change over time, and they are running with non-bloated operating systems and non-bloated code, the only really impressive thing, perhaps, is the longevity of the chips themselves. I wish my computers as durable instead of being designed as landfill fodder. I'll take continuity / dependability over speed, thanks very much.
IAANE Nuclear power plants are still installing equipment based on the 80386 architecture. It is very reliable which is a requirement when working on safety systems.
Off-topic, but it makes me wonder how badly a super-slimmed consumer product would act in space. I'm sure they've done a test or two, what with crew bringing up personal electronics, but I'd be curious to know.
I mean, like, take any of the halfway recent products from Apple; they're using modern, dense processors and storage, and they not only have nothing shielding them, they have virtually nothing TO them, except the screen and battery. If radiation was going to flip bits in the processor, or in the memory, it'd do it on a product like that.
I suppose it would probably only manifest with crashes and lost data. It'd be more interesting if, for example, the video ram was a big ol' target for it to hit, and every solar storm made your device's screen start spewing pretty colors. That'd probably be far too dangerous for the astronauts, though.
the 1980s 386 processors that keep the International Space Station aloft.
Pardon a bit of physics-prof snark, but I'm pretty sure it's physics that keeps ISS aloft. Keeping it operational and habitable, however, requires a computer, I'm sure.
What the article doesn't mention is that the smaller the die, the more vulnerable it is to radiation flying through and flipping bits. The older chips are more resistant: they're bigger, and so can take more.
And yes, I do have this from friends at places like NASA and JPL and Fermilab....
mark
Both their personal use and client experiments. It lephs if they are hardened to 10Gs. 3G is normal maximum, but 10G transients occasionally.
You have to be a retard to spec a 8 core 650 watt i7 monster to do simple tasks when an embedded i386 that uses 4.2 watts can do it.
In fact MOST industrial systems still use 386 processors for brand new stuff. a lot of 104+ boards are still 386 for low power consumption uses.
Sounds like the Author of the article knows very little to absolute nothing about computers in industrial and aerospace.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
OK, later ones aren't exactly non-deterministic, but the 386 was the last of the straightforward microprocessors, that simply executed one instruction aftr another. No microcode, out-of-order execution, crazy on-chip L2/L3 caches, etc.
Wonder if that leads to easier "verification" at a very low level, if NASA cares about that...
I have watched, sometimes in horror, sometimes in great amusement, as employer after employer decided that hardware and/or software "upgrades" are necessary. And why were these decisions made? Certainly not because of a lack of functionality in the existing software. No, the decision to "upgrade" was made because the existing software was "out of date", or "not written in "C" or "Java" or whatever flavor-of-the-moment programming language was current at the time. And users and user management were never smart - or ballsy - enough to say "Whoa, we're happy with what we have - it works and fits our business model just fine" (you'd be amazed at how many businesses change their business processes to fit software). So keep those old warhorse systems that work just fine and fit your business needs, and get rid of those people who keep saying "Well, we need new/updated/improved software". Put in new software and you'll start down the same old bug-fix/enhancement road all over again, only this time with a system that you don't understand nearly as well as the one you replaced. Good for IT types, bad for the business. MK
I believe the military/space administration utilize chips that have been proven to work in a space based environment. I’m not sure what there QA processes are. I wonder how a P7 would perform in some space based systems. What are your thoughts?
It's a real problem. The most reliable IC technologies, like silicon-on-sapphire, which is radiation-hard aren't that popular. The most reliable CPU designs are one-instruction-per-clock CPUs.
There are many sources of error in commercial-grade electronics, and the efforts to stamp them out aren't as intense as they could be. I went to a talk at Stanford last week by a computer designer who's trying to cram even more CPUs on a board, and he had some slides on DRAM error rates. Different groups are measuring error rates four orders of magnitude apart. And they don't know why. Some people have been blaming ambient radiation, but that can't possibly explain some of the higher error rate results.
What will NASA be using in another 30 years when the existing processors and components in their toolboxes become over 60 years old?
How old was all this equipment when it was first integrated into the shuttle? I'm guessing most of it wasn't more than 5 or 6 years old at the time. So will the next generation of space shuttles have processors and such from the mid 2000s?
You need to pay attention to history.
In 1969, IBM was forced to "unbundle" the software it was giving away with its hardware. This created the commercial software industry. If you're looking for a villain in the piece, it's the US Government, not Bill Gates.
Although there was a lot of free software around in the mid-70s (not the 80s) it was coming from hobbyists and academics whose livelihood was assured from other sources. Outside of these cushy environments, people sold their software and honest people bought it.
Since Gates had put a price on Basic, and he didn't have a soft academic job to keep him in caffeine and pizza, he had a right to expect people to pay him for his work.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
You should not spell it using one uppercase letter. :(
There's a public portal to the US Defense Department's open source clearing house:
http://www.forge.mil/
I gather there's discussion to broadening the program to the US Federal Government in general.
asked Rodney McKay, I mean we didn't build the Deadalus without a little help from our friends.. I mean sheesh you think we could have built ships like Destiny that are TRUE solar power??
"We pay you for doing nothing, but if the alien invades you are the first to die."
That I used to fix for them, back when they were pretty new? I'd be surprised if they actually did, it was a nice setup, reliable and all, and would have been a good bit of work to do. They had about 1 per experiment per bird back then, up in Maryland. It was a nice place to visit while some real engineers still worked there, instead of mostly impractical academics now.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Sometimes using outdated technology has advantages.
I remember hearing about a state of the art Soviet fighter. Its pilot defected to the West and the CIA inspected the plane thoroughly before returning it to the Soviet Union. The plane was using vacuum tubes in the radio at a time that equivalent Western fighters were using integrated circuits in their radios. It was realized that using vacuum tubes made them resistant to the effects of electromagnetic pulse from atomic bombs. They would be ale to withstand more radiation than Western fighters. Probably vacuum tubes were not used because of this and this was just a side benefit.
Reliability is more important than speed or low power consumption.
It's amazing how much junk is just abandoned floating around out there, good hardware really. On occasion someone will bounce a signal off a hunk of metal up there, but most of is goes unused.
I routinely tell friends and family that there are two definitions of obsolete:
1. If you can buy it, it's obsolete: there are at least two new generations in the pipeline.
2. When it ceases to do what you need done (in the manner in which you need it done), it's obsolete.
The former is true but not really useful. The latter is much more useful. The tech used by NASA (and most armed services) is old, but it meets the needs. Changing the tech would be difficult and expensive. Case in point: at least into the 1990s, the Canadian and American navies used core memory (at best, a 1960s technology). The reason they used it was that it had the attribute that if power was lost and then restored, the program could continue running from where it left off. Until I left that company in 1990, I was able to daily watch people making core memory.
I see everyone saying that old technology is 'sufficient' to do the job and that it is reliable. If reliability is such an issue, don't we have redundancy for that? Isn't anyone thinking of the potential of having state of the art technology? Use the processing power for the AI or something.
Agreed! Just look at the problems Qantas had with an airbus that just tried to fall out of the sky and all these new Toyota and other cars with 'sticky' accelerators!
When sales persons sell computers and electronics, they tout the usability, standardisation, ruggedness, longivety etc. but when it comes to selling upgrades, its entirely different. Good to see that NASA is still able to use the old hardware (with the old systems). Even linux is bloated nowadays.
Troll if I ever saw one. No mod points, though.
Their last supply source is Richard Stallman, who in the nineties stored thousands of 386DXs in a vault, along with 512 MB SDRAM sticks for future generations to run GNU software in the purest way achievable. Besides, they are pretty.
In space flight old computers are used because of the high radiation in space. If you would use the modern, high density, computer chips, you would get too many bit flips and hardware lockups.
Know what you talk about, before shooting at the engineers :-) ..
PS
No, I am not from Nasa.