US Navy buys Apple as Linux Platform 239
Nine Mirrors Turning writes "According to the Register the US Navy has ordered 260 XServe servers running Yellow Dog Linux from Terra Soft Solutions. Terra Soft is the only reseller allowed to resell Apple hardware with a third-party operating system installed. The XServes will be modified by a unnamed third-party and will be running a custom kernel. The XServes are destined for US Navy submarines and will be used for real-time image processing. I do wonder how many will be installed on each sub, though. Are we talking clustering here? I didn't even know the USN was running Linux on front-line ships."
number one (Score:5, Funny)
Do you think that the rest of the world would fear the USA military so much if their front-line troops were running windows?
Re:number one (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-2
Re:number one (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:number one (Score:4, Informative)
Text messages also lead to shorter burst transmissions that are more difficult to locate by the bad guys.
Re:number one (Score:5, Informative)
Re:number one (Score:5, Funny)
I would. Hell, one BSOD could light off every missle in their payload, each randomly pointed at a different location!
Number two. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:number one (Score:2)
Reboot reboot reboot (Score:3)
Re:number one (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1998/july13/cov
"Atlantic Fleet officials acknowledged that the Yorktown last September experienced what they termed "an engineering local area network casualty," but denied that the ship's systems failure lasted as long as DiGiorgio said. The Yorktown was dead in the water for about two hours and 45 minutes, fleet officials said, and did not have to be towed in."
"The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its computers were unable to divide by the number zero, the memo said. The Yorktown's Standard Monitoring Control System administrator entered zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program. That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature remote terminal units, the memo said."
"The Navy reduced the Yorktown crew by 10 percent and saved more than $2.8 million a year using the computers. The ship uses dual 200-MHz Pentium Pros from Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala. The PCs and server run NT 4.0 over a high-speed, fiber-optic LAN."
That was 1997-98
Web Myth: WinNT Failure Stops Ship (Score:4, Informative)
The chief engineer on the ship at the time, and the developer of the application software, seem to say that the problem was not with WinNT:
http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus2.
"Others insist that NT was not the culprit. According to Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, who was the chief engineer on board the ship at the time of the incident, the fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg, Va. As Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE, admits, "If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours." But McKelvey adds that the crash would not have happened if the navy had been using a production version of the CAE software, which he asserts has safeguards to prevent the type of failure that occurred."
Uh-oh.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uh-oh.. (Score:5, Funny)
In other news today: The U.S. Navy today responded to a lawsuit by privately-held company SCO by invading their headquarters, and bombarding it into the ground with cruise missles.
When reached for comment, Admiral trigger-happy said "Fuck it. They were pissing everybody off. I just got bored."
Re:Uh-oh.. (Score:2)
As it is, that response would probably save everyone a lot of time and money.
Re:Uh-oh.. (Score:5, Funny)
Even the submitter didn't read the article (Score:5, Informative)
From post: Are we talking clustering here?
From Article On board clusters of the Apple rack server will be used for real-time image processing.
Emphasis mine
Re:Even the submitter didn't read the article (Score:3, Informative)
So... if they were spread evenly across ALL the subs, we'd be looking at about 4 Xserves per sub. Whether they'd cluster all 4, or cluster 3 with 1 spare, or cluster 2 with 2 spare, I don't know.
(Personally, as someone who's clustered Linux a bit, I'd cluster all 4. It's a cluster, for crying out loud, it's supposed to be redundant, and if y
Re:Even the submitter didn't read the article (Score:3, Informative)
Interestingly enough, four of our SSBN's are currently undergoing retrofit to convert them to SSGN's, guided missile submarines. Wonder if they'll be the ones getting the new computer systems.
Why XServes for Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
In that case PowerPC servers are a given, and Apple's are probably some of the best on bang for the buck.
"Bang for the Buck" (Score:2)
If, on the other hand, they'd already tested the software on that hardware, THEN you might see cost savings that make them sit up and take notice.
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Some tests have already proven that the G5 is not overwhelmingly superior to the G4 when using Altivec code (just a linear increase with the clock rates). Thus waiting for G5 systems is probably not needed in this case.
As the article clearly states, these systems will be used for signal processing applications, where the vector extensions really shine. So in terms of computational power/required energy to run (very important in submarines, i assume) i can image that the G4 are very competitive.
As for the Linux vs. Os X, well, we do have to agree that Linux is very well supported and already qualified for many tasks/contracts (which Os X might not??).
T
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because god only knows you have to watch power consumption when you're sitting on a nuclear power plant.
I know - this probably has no technical merit - but it is worth noting I would imagine, that nuclear power is abundant and hot - so the power/heat specs of the PC are probably null and void...
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, Lintel/Wintel machines can be designed to be quiet, but those off-the-rack XServes are probably quieter, at least in a bang-for-the-buck kind of comparison. (Now a cluster of Cubes, ...)
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
An XServe has like 9 Blower fans in it and sounds like an old dust buster but louder.
Luckily they are easily muted by being put into sound dampening cabinets which work extremely well. Unfortunately for a submarine those things are rather large too. I wouldnt put it past them to gut the XServes and put them into their own fabricated cases.
I have yet to see a high end silent 1U server Because of the blower situation. Theres nothing silent about blower fans.
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
The speed of the XServe fans is controlled by software.
Out of the box, an XServe will even stop rotating some fans when the temperature is low enough. It is not unthinkable to hack the XServe for a full stop of the fans when the mission requires so. Additionally, in the unfortunate case of some part failing due to excessive temperature (not that probable, since for deployment in a submarine ruggedized parts are used
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
An Xserve is at least as loud - if not louder - than name brand (and probably generic as well) 1U x86 boxes.
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hint -- put the hardware in a sound-proof cabinet that's isolated with rubber shock mounts from the rest of the boat. No more noise problems.
Of course the major sound source on a boat is the reactor/propulsion system...
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:2)
I would find that quite surprising - each G5 CPU has two Altivec units within it (i.e., four total in a 2xG5 system).
Obviously you're unlikely to get perfect parallelism out of them, but I doubt a second unit would have been added if it was of no benefit in typical code - it sounds more likely that the test you quote was a particularly poorly performi
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also having the hard drive or hard drives hot-swappable would be a good thing to reduce down time since it would take less time to swap a failed drive with a good drive in an Xserve than pull o
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:2)
Re:Why XServes for Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
If they went with Apple's XServe OS X, there is a lot of other stuff in there they would have to contend with that could probably break what they are doing. So rather than spend time working out the differences, they chose the route of, "Go with what you know."
Why didn't they buy a Sun? (Score:2)
Re:Why didn't they buy a Sun? (Score:5, Informative)
Size considerations (Score:5, Insightful)
Another major difference between the two is the size; you can stack a lot more XServes than you can Sun machines of similar power (420R, 220R, not to mention the Enterprise 450, which is HUGE) given a fixed amount of space.
It is reasonable to assume that, since these are being put into submarines, space is of a limited quantity, so the reduced physical profile of the XServes may also have played a part in the decision making process.
Re:Size considerations (Score:3, Informative)
Um, the E450 is huge because it can hold 20 disks. It also supports 4 processors, which the current xserve's do not. Not to mention that it is no longer available from sun.
The closest comparison I can find to a Apple Xserve in sun's product line would be a 1u V210 which lists for
Re:Why didn't they buy a Sun? (Score:2)
Re:Why didn't they buy a Sun? (Score:2)
Finally... (Score:4, Funny)
SCO vs. Navy (Score:5, Funny)
Navy: OK - how about we give you half a million and you keep the change?
SCO: GREAT!
Navy: OK, tell us the address to send it to.
SCO: <gives corporate address>
Navy: Tomahawk targeting confirmed - you have a go for launch.
Re:SCO vs. Navy (Score:2)
Re:SCO vs. Navy (Score:2)
no one remembers the NT crash? (Score:5, Informative)
They probably looked at alternatives after Windows NT crashed from a division-by-zero error and left a navy ship dead on the water for several hours [gcn.com].
Re:no one remembers the NT crash? (Score:2, Informative)
The transition is pretty far-reaching. The Navy was even balking at using a Windows server for a web service back end that would feed info to a Linux (java) front end!
Maybe there are some intell
Re:no one remembers the NT crash? (Score:2)
But is there someone who really debates the use of linux over ISS for WEB applications anymore? I mean for god sakes, the web is designed for unix technology, the entire thing was built around a unix foundation and is designed for unix systems to interoperate at the very core. In this case linux is just a cheap *nix. And when it comes to web there is no reasonable debate, *nix wins, each time, every time.
Re:no one remembers the NT crash? (Score:2)
Just my opinion though
Re:no one remembers the NT crash? (Score:2)
MS-SQL sucks, I actually can't think of ANY sql package which doesn't beat it out in every respect except perhaps integration with other MS products.
Free application server... again I refer you to open source software and linux,
Re:no one remembers the NT crash? (Score:3, Insightful)
As has been noted numerous times before in pretty much every forum available, NT had little to do with it. That's probably not the best article to use as "proof" either - would you believe the technical competency of someone who said "your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the
I remember, you don't, NT not at fault (Score:2)
Web Myth: WinNT failure stopped ship [slashdot.org]
I remember, you don't, NT *is* partially at fault (Score:2)
Your topic doesn't make sense, since I can't "not remember" an article that I might not have read.
Besides, maybe you didn't read this thread:
http://lists.insecure.org/lists/politech/2000/Aug / 0027.html [insecure.org]
Which actually partially references the article you mentioned, even though you cited a link that doesn't even work. (http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus2. html [sciam.com] (nope, doesn't work even without the spaces))
I find it cute that NT crashes to its knees be
Web Myth: WinNT Failure Stops Ship (Score:2)
"Others insist that NT was not the culprit. According to Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, who was the chief engineer on board the ship at the time of the incident, the fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg, Va. As Harvey McKelvey,
not really surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
When you're on a sub that requires every inch of space to be utilised, these are attributes that make a computing system very attractive.
Once Apple deploys the G5s into these puppies, I think there's going to be a lot of organisations looking at their present hardware rigs in a very critical light.
-- james
Re:not really surprising (Score:3, Funny)
Once Apple deploys the G5s into these puppies, I think there's going to be a lot of organisations looking at their present hardware rigs in a very critical light."
"Ensign, engage Silent Mode"
"Aye captain, let me just switch on these 250 fans here."
Trolling the silly responses (Score:5, Interesting)
The more interesting question is why Apple instead of Sun hardware. Given the XServes were supposedly originally designed to the NIH's specs, it may be that they're the most cost-effective answer to the problem.
And... completely off topic... can someone please tell Mr. Bush that outside of Texas it's nuclear, not nuke-u-leer.
Re:Trolling the silly responses (Score:2)
And, as many people have observed before, if that's the worst criticism of him you can think of...
Re:Trolling the silly responses (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Trolling the silly responses (Score:5, Insightful)
If memory serves, subs run in the 100s of billions of dollars a unit.
Old age is catching up with you. Divide by 100(s). I served on 2 Los Angeles Class submarines. The first, kind of in between 1st and 2nd flight boats, cost a little in excess of US$750 million in 1985 US$. The second, a second flight boat, cost about US$900 million. Ohio class boats, aka Tridents cost about $2.5 billion. B2 bombers cost about US$4 billion. Sans weapons systems.
Nukeyewlar (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Trolling the silly responses (Score:2, Interesting)
skinny was here.
Re:Trolling the silly responses (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Heat/Power Use
2) Space
3) Cost
vs. Sun:
1) Space
2) Heat/Power Use
3) Cost
Given that it is a submarine, space and heat are more important that cost. Especially if in the same volume, for the same price, for roughly the same processing power, you use significantly less power and generate less heat. (Don't forget that less heat means less power too cool the sub as well, or that more fans = more noise.)
(BTW, XServes are hot-swappable. I doubt the Navy doesn't have a set of fault-toleran
Silly silly silly... (Score:3, Interesting)
I seem to recall an ep of JAG where precisely that happened. Of course, they changed the culprit from the vendor QA department to North Korean Intelligence...
I very much doubt if either the Navy or Lockheed cares what the specific hardware pl
Re:Trolling the silly responses (Score:2)
and the new Apple hardware is not yet known to be unreliable.
Um... (Score:2)
Did this stand out to anyone else? Image processing on a sub? I wasn't aware that they could see underwater. But I'll bet that's what's being worked-on here... Hmmm.
Re:Um... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Um... (Score:2)
I don't know why, but I just had this sudden urge to throw in a Star Trek reference.
Re:Um... (Score:2)
In addition to periscope images, they could process and analyze downlinks of data. Imagine people on subs analyzing data in real time with intel folks on shore/targets.
Re:Um... (Score:2)
Noise? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Noise? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Noise? (Score:2)
Must have something to do with the spectrum of the noise; I heard there's lots of special noise dampening hardware to foil enemy sub trackers.
How much are they paying for these things? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How much are they paying for these things? (Score:2, Informative)
Brave Navy Program Manager needs to take a bow (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that in almost every case - like the one i referenced, these systems are still.. today..
In fairness, many of these SBCs are built to extreme timing tolerances, have insane backplane speed and often have RF gear built in... in the case of real-time processing. you _have_ to have this, and therefore, these costs are justified.
But a lot of the time, they simply wanted to use them for post-processing of data.. not real time.. so everything you made up in speed on these highly custom boards was useless...
i always wondered - silently - wtf is wrong with you people (engineers who come up with the "requirement" to run SBCs for post processing")? You can get 1U dual 1 GHz G4's to run the SAME SOFTWARE for 1/3 the price? Why won't you even concider it? ARRRGH!!!!
Well, it seems that there is some very very very very brave program manager in the Navy who stuck his/her neck out and proved what i always thought in silence... that this buying of slow G4-based SBC's to do DSP post processing was stupid and silly. The answer was to get some Xserves and do it two to 4 times as fast for 1/3 the money.
This is not so much a coup for TerraSoft - though, of course, they did the "hard work"... but let me tell you.. whoever the Navy PM was took a LOT of shit for their suggestion to use Macs. I guarantee you that.
I hope we'll be able to find out who that PM was.. i'd liek to talk to them and find out how they made the sell...
Apple computer is a BAD WORD in the Government.. and this was really a coup on the part of everyone involved... but don't think that its a novel idea or somehow "amazing". Using dozens of rack-mount G4 macs has been the elephant in the middle of the room solution to literally thousands of DoD problems for at least 5 years... its actually pretty pathetic and sad how long it took for it to make it to prime time.
Re:Brave Navy Program Manager needs to take a bow (Score:2)
Single board computers like THIS one.... [synergymicro.com]running multiple G4's at 466 Mhz (be still my beating heart! BLAZING speed)
note to self... PREVIEW DAMINT!
Re:Brave Navy Program Manager needs to take a bow (Score:3, Interesting)
I cannot count the number of times we must weigh political credibility vs. pursuing the technically correct solution and have to bit our tongues about suggesting an Apple derived solutuion. I too must hand it to the PM for having th
Is Yellow Dog doing something better than Red Hat? (Score:4, Interesting)
Regardless I always thought the whole Apple advantage was the way having hardware and OS under one roof allowed you to make great "gestaltic" solutions. Why pay the Xserve premium and get G4 powered rack hardware to install an OS that's available for cheaper, and argueably better supported, x86 hardware? (And I've been a Mac user for over a decade and even tried out YDL and LPPC a couple of times... this isn't flame bait.)
Still, either Yellow Dog must be doing *something* better than Red Hat is (maintenance price?) or they must be running something that was designed *explicitly for* AltiVec.
Which compiler is the Navy going to use? (Score:2, Insightful)
As it happens, I work on this program ... (Score:5, Informative)
As you can imagine, there are a lot of details about this program that are not publicly releaseable, even if they aren't classified. You can find about more about ARCI via Google, but start with this PDF [lockheedmartin.com]; it's mostly marketing pitch, but it does describe what we're doing.
I can offer some insights into the factors driving this particular decision:
You have to keep in mind the physical environment of a submarine: there isn't a lot of space on a boat for active equipment, much less spares. Redundancy is a must, as is reliability.
Photonic masts (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course sonar systems would benefit from compute servers as well.
Imagine... (Score:2)
Re:This is NOT helping... (Score:4, Funny)
Please check with a network time server. Your troll is off by about 4 years. HTH. YHBT. YHL. KTHX. BBYE.
Re:The Navy XServe Problems (Score:2)
X Servs are rackable
X Servs are servers and as such are designed for reliability, not bleeding edge speed .
Finally, YDL is a very good Linux distribution. It's like RedHat, but better, and has very good Mac hardware support. They're probably choosing Linux over OS-X because they don't want all the fluff that comes with OS-X, and Linux is free as in speach. These computers are destined to be tools, and good tools don't have unnecessary features.
Re:The Navy XServe Problems (Score:2)
Even the original complaint was using a 68k mac
Re:The Navy XServe Problems (Score:2)
I suspect that in this case Linux is free as in "we already have people trained to use it".
Dave
Re:Why Apple harware, and why not OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why Apple harware, and why not OS X (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe performance is an issue? Learn about AltiVec here [apple.com].
No doubt the primary consideration here is operations/second, with operations/watt being a close second, and operations/volume being a near third. The G4 is the industry leader for the first two criteria, and the XServe is a COTS implementation with a low volume requirement.
Also, Apple gear is known for its quality/reliability and these things might be expected to run for 6 months without the possibility of service or replacement.
Plus, with the G5's announced, they can expect to double their performance in a year with a million dollar swapout but they can get started today. That's really frikkin' cheap for retrofitting a sub fleet. This probably can be seen as confirmation that the XServe is not going to have a formfactor change with the G5's (most likely on the 90nm process in Nov).
Re:Why Apple harware, and why not OS X (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why Apple harware, and why not OS X (Score:2, Funny)
Not with the XServe they don't. They sound like a vacuum cleaner with a sore throat.
Navy Surplus? (Score:2, Funny)
They're not using OS X because... (Score:5, Informative)
The Navy wanted a custom Xserve chassis, and the work was organized by Terra Soft who employed a third-party to modify the hardware. Terra Soft provided a custom kernel and drivers for Fibre Channel storage.
So perhaps Apple weren't interested in making custom X-Serves, or hacking OS X to fit...
Whatever the custom hardware is (Fibre-Channel disk arrays by the sound of it) probably isn't supported by stock OS X.
Re:They're not using OS X because... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They're not using OS X because... (Score:2)
However, from reading the Register article, it did read as though the changes made were in that area - maybe I'm speculating too far?
Whatever... the reason they're not using OS X is (I imagine) because it's easier to write a driver for the new/changed hardware under Linux than OS X - I don't know why, Darwin's just as open source!
Re:Why Apple harware, and why not OS X (Score:2)
Almost certainly they've got some custom-written application that benefits massively from Altivec. There's precious little other reasons to choose an Xserve over some name-brand x86 1U machine if it's going to be running Linux (except for internal stor
Re:Why Apple harware, and why not OS X (Score:5, Interesting)
The Typhoon (NATO name) nuclear missile submarine has a swimming pool in it.
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/10/23/38544_
"...crew's rest area is like a club with lots of conveniences. There is a gym, a sauna, and even a pool there. We saw some submariners swimming there, having good time at work."
http://arms.host.sk/navy/941.htm
Modern American submarines all have air conditioning aboard.
http://www.dt.navy.mil/pao/excerpts%20pages/199
"In addition, we have conducted many trials on actual and smaller scale components and systems on the Large Scale Vehicle (Kokanee) and other test platforms, as well as the actual Seawolf, itself. Some of the many unclassified equipment items in which the Division played a large part include: - Air conditioning compressors"
http://www.usscod.org/fact.html
"Habitability is heavily stressed in the construction of modern submarines. Specially designed color schemes, mechanical conveniences, air conditioning, and the best chow in the Navy are supplied to make the vessels more livable. A full time staff is maintained by Electric Boat Division to work out 'human engineering' problems."
Re: US Navy buys Apple as Linux Platform (Score:2)
So like 80 subs. Not all of them get the new tech, of course. So maybe clusters of 4 or 5 of these things?
Re:Obligatory Anti-US Humor (Score:2)