B-2 Stealth Bomber Gets Upgrade, Joins the '90s

WmHBlair writes "Flightglobal has a report about the upgrades being made to the B-2A Stealth Bomber, which include Pentium class processors, JOVIAL code rewritten in C, and fibre channel hard drives. The Register, as usual, makes light of this event with a tongue-in-cheek news item noting that the upgrade drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the '90s."

I hate to break it to anybody

but microprocessors that are designed to handle a nuclear EMP aren't blazing fast. But they are definitely not 90s technology.

I think the B-2 bomber will be fine unless its pilots require the extra computing power to play "punch the monkey" or the South Park Lemmiwinks game.

Bitchin'

Can't wait to see it fire up and have the screen print out: It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Re:Bitchin'

More likely "It is pitch black, which is correct for a Stealth Bomber.".

Don't you mean?

...upgrades ... include Pentium class processors ... "drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the 90s"

89.999997612?

Re:Don't you mean?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug [wikipedia.org]

There's a Reason for That

While the headline might be good for a light giggle, there's a good reason why it's 10 years behind. Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die. That especially goes for a plane that uses a flying wing design (which are historically hard to stabilize without computer control), and potentially carries nuclear warheads.

Re:There's a Reason for That

In this case...

avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people don't die.

Re:There's a Reason for That

... or the wrong people die.

Re:There's a Reason for That

No, the GP is correct. As Patton once said (paraphrasing), "the point is not for you to die for your country, but the make the other poor bastard die for his."

Re:There's a Reason for That

More than that. Aircraft, especially military aircraft that fly at the altitudes the B2 does, also require "hardened" electronics, capable of handling much larger temperature ranges and higher electro-magnetic interference. That means the processors, while they may be Pentium class, are not Pentium's. They may even use ceramics for the ICs, but either way the new electronics would require a much larger feature size, and therefore less performance than the current cutting edge electronics.

Re:There's a Reason for That

"pentium class", not pentium. It's actually an ARM processor (better tolerance to heat, radiation, environmental extremes, etc).

Re:Free of BUGS?

Are you sure? Software tends to be written by developers, and its the quality of them, their ability to work to quality standards and basically take their time to get it done right that matters. All that C code you've seen crash - it'll be because someone hacked it together, no-one tested it thoroughly enough, and no-one took the time to do it right. C is even easy to code reliably if you impose some restrictions on yourself (or use some libraries/routines that you can't easily take shortcuts with - eg if you can pass a pointer to a routine, you're going to pass a bad one one day, do some wrong arithmentic on it, etc. If you pass a strict fixed-size buffer, then you're much less likely to get an error. Just a simple example).

The point is you can write bad software in any language, the new C# stuff at work crashes all over the place and is slow. The old C code from 1984 is still working fine. Its not these languages that had anything to do with their relative quality.

eg. Spacecraft are written in C [oreilly.com], and they've worked better than anyone expected:

The only reason I brought that up is because one of my editors said, Oh look, they have Java on this thing.

Oh, Java. Well, we have Java in the ground system not onboard the spacecraft.

Right. That's what it's starting to sound like.

That's right. Yeah. The spacecraft software is entirely in C.

C? Really? That surprises me a little bit.

Yes. It's entirely in C.

I thought Lockheed Martin was a big ADA shop for this sort of thing.

ADA is used largely in military applications, but JPL at any rate has moved away from ADA. Cassini, I believe, would be the last JPL mission that used ADA. And that was largely due to the success of the Mars Pathfinder in the mid-nineties. And as I said, these missions are to a large extent all derived from Mars Pathfinder.

After that successful mission, you say, Hey, we could do it in C now. That's not as scary as everybody thought?

Yeah. Right.

Better functionally quaint than gee-whiz and oops

As was recently discussed about the current Mars lander mission, it's really just fine if something built to do a very specific job doesn't have support for this week's gamer-friendly video board, a hacked Wii controller, bluetooth, and a dozen USB ports. Hardened, reliable hardware and bug-free seems better than, say, some of the misadventures [www.cbc.ca] that some IT-intensive commercial aircraft have suffered over the last few years. It's OK to be one notch less cool when you're flying around with large weapons.

Re:Regarding that Mars lander...

Dude, its on Mars. Everythings infrared.

Not surprised, even if I am amused

Having worked for a defense contractor (non-weapons, mind you) for 6 years, it doesn't surprise me at all that the technology for such things are at least 10 years behind state of the art. It takes so long to fully satisfy the requirements of a military contract, then it takes at least as long to fix all the little bugs that inevitably pop up after delivery; then there's the military amending their requirements halfway through the project, sometimes resulting in having to go almost all the way back to square one in the design cycle. Oh, and don't even get me started on requirements that belong in cartoons and comic books, not the real world of engineering.

Re:Not surprised, even if I am amused

Yea, at least dealing with the private sector and private contracts you don't have to worry about any of those issues.

Favourite quote from El 'Reg:

Naturally the stealth bomber's software has to be rewritten for the new platform, in particular the operational flight program (OFP) - the app which lets the ungainly plane fly, rather than lurching out of control as it would without constant computer assistance. (A recent B-2 crash shortly after takeoff at the Pacific island of Guam was caused by a false sensor data feed into the OFP, resulting from an airspeed measuring device being affected by tropical moisture. The duff data fooled the OFP app into wrecking the $2bn bomber - while the pilots were unable to do anything to stop it.)

Brilliant!

maybe they should have stayed in the '60s

I'm not sure that replacing JOVIAL code with C code is actually progress. If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.

Re:maybe they should have stayed in the '60s

If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.

It's HAPPIER.

90's IS cutting edge for that stuff.

What this article seems to overlook is that they DONT WANT new computers and new operating systems, new languages. They want older, stable, rpedictable, thoroughly vetted technologies.

They dont need a super computer to fly these, but what they do need os to know every quirk, every instability, and already have dealt with it so that NOTHING even remotely suprises them.

Thats why moving to C is a big step.

it may seem silly to us because we run all sorts of new stuff on our computers designed to run many things we may never use; These are VERY purpose built, need very little flexibility outside its designated purpose, and doesnt need to be overdone.

I may buy a PC system anticipating programs down the road that might be expanded, but for an aircraft, missiles, sattelites, even the space shuttle which runs EVRY old code, they just need it to do exactly what it needs too, and if that works fine with 256k, then thats what it will get, as long as its stable as all hell.

Re:90's IS cutting edge for that stuff.

I've worked on military CPU replacement in the past for a subcontractor. We were upgrading an early 60s avionics set built from, get this, AND, OR and NOR gates. The most complex part was a 4 bit shift register - pretty wild. So I know a bit about this.

The major problem with using components newer than the mid-90s is that they are so sensitive to radiation. Not EM, but Alpha particles and other cosmic rays. Its prohibitively expensive to rad-harden (radiation harden) sub-100nm chips and when that is achieved the yields are so low that the cost balloons even more. Radiation hits my cause the rare BSOD for you, on a nuclear armed aircraft its may show up as a MCOD - mushroom cloud of destruction.

So what?

That just means their development & testing cycle runs about 15 years. That doesn't seem terribly unreasonable given that reliability is paramount for a billion dollar piece of equipment.

I work on brand new industrial controls that are still using Z80 processors.

Probably not x86

It's "Pentium class", not "Pentium". I would bet my money on this comptuer being PowerPC based, probably PowerPC 74xx based, also known as "G4" of Macintosh fame. There are _a_lot_ of PowerPC based avionics, and cutting edge airplanes like Eurofighter, Gripen and F-22 have multiple PowerPC based systems doing all kinds of stuff. When doing embedded electronics for the military you are not going far pitching Intel stuff. You are going to use hardware from manufacturers that can guarantee parts that'll keep being manufactured over many years and are harndened to endure rapid heat, cold, moist and preassure fluctuations. Intel are doing commodity products for low end table environments. Look to manufacturers like Freescale for the stable and durable stuff.

Exactly right. It's obsolete

They should have written all the flight control in Ruby & made it an AJAX web application that runs on Firefox on an iPhone. That would make it zillions of times faster than that old C code & Pentiums, right?

well it's not as if they want Vista on it

You wish to drop the bomb: Cancel or Allow?