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Linux Takes Flight on Northwest Simulators

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the I-spent-tuesday-laid-over-in-detroit dept.

Rewbob writes "Northwest arlines is spending $34 million to convert its flight simulators to linux. " Nifty practical applications. Normally when neat toys like this come along, I beg for someone to send me one, but for some reason, I don't expect NW to ship an airplane simulator over to the Geek Compound. But the best part is that there will be one less Fortran program out there *grin*.

1 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Flight Sims and *ix by Daa · · Score: 5

    I know both NWA and Opinicus. The rehost from Vax/VMS to Linux makes sense to me, actually the
    OS is not real critical as a Sim tends to use almost NO OS features in operation. Flight Sims run a realtime dispatcher on top of whatever OS they boot from, and newer Sims are distributed computing systems with the host OS doing little during operation. just for reference the new A320 and 777 Sims from Thomson use 15-25 Motorola VME CPU cards spread in cages both on the Sim and in the computer room, and one of those runs Mot SYSV unix and talks to the "host" Sun workstation , the rest all run a custom RTOS.

    dave