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.'"

Not really news.

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Simulating what, exactly?

[CarpetShark]

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.

Re:It's pretty much a given that they saved money

[TheRaven64]

Tens of dollars? The last military flight sim I played with cost £20m, which is about $32m (or $38m if we're talking Australian $) at the current exchange rate. Possibly costs have come down a lot since then, but they seem to have saved a lot of money somewhere. It was quite fun to fly - panoramic views through the simulated cockpit windows and hydraulic systems moving it in response to my actions - but it was even more fun to sit in the instructors' chair and add a flight in interceptors just as the pilot was coming up for mid-air refuelling.

Re:Simulating what, exactly?

[Skillet5151]

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.

Re:Screenshots pls

[chill]

Screenshots? How about a torrent!

FTFA: Linux for real-time scheduling

[Zantetsuken]

FTFA:

All the nodes run Suse Linux. Unlike traditional Linux clusters, which focus on throughput, these systems are tuned for real-time performance - using features of the kernel such as memory locking, real-time scheduling and low-delay communication.

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.

Re:$1.7m is dirt cheap! but missing something

[wronskyMan]

Actually, many sims do not require force feedback. Pilots generally learn the "mechanics" of feel and how to control a plane in relatively inexpensive prop/jet trainers in basic pilot training. Much of what sims are used for is switchology - how to run checklists and operate all the complex electronic gear in a modern cockpit. With the more rote items committed to muscle memory, pilots can focus on the "feel" in the actual airplane since their flow/checks come automatically. In addition, very realistic emergency procedure training can be had since it is difficult to safely simulate many emergencies in the actual aircraft. Finally, for aircrew who are already proficient in the aircraft, new tactics/procedures can be tried much more quickly and easily than trying to schedule/fly an actual flight.

Re:It's pretty much a given that they saved money

[Nefarious Wheel]

There may be more or better or less expensive graphics/rendering libraries and other software available for Linux as opposed to Windows. It may be that the software for turning a pile of Linux boxes into a rendering farm is free or less expensive or more efficient than the equivalent for Windows.

I remember the keynote to the Queensland TechEd 2007 where they showed the some 600,000 rendered penguins (no, not Tux) in one scene for the animated film Happy Feet. Then I remembered the producer saying the render farm was several thousand Windows boxes running NT4. This in 2007, mind you.

Then I thought -- there's no way Microsoft would have known about the licenses for those thousands of servers, they were so old, and that many would have crippled their budget ...

So there you have it. The state of the art is undoubtedly Massively OverAge - Parallel Environments of Windows - Piratically Esourced Windows Servers (MOA-PEW-PEWS).

I suddenly have this ghastly urge to go roll a Horde character and chat in the Barrens. Soz, cya, bbl...