GPS Transitions to New Control System 170
gsfprez writes "It took us a long time, but the Air Force has finally moved off of the 1970's mainframe GPS control system and is now running on a new Unix-based Control System called AEP — Architecture Evolution Plan. It's important to remember that current GPS satellites are basically solar powered iPod shuffles with atomic clocks that simply playback whatever we upload into them at a precise rate. They don't actually have any idea where they are — its the control system at Schriever Air Force Base that does. The new system will be a lot cheaper to support and modify since Sun stocks things like SATA drives - while digging up Saturday Night Fever-era DASDs isn't simple. AEP will also allow us to be ahead of the curve: we're basically good to go to fly the new IIF birds."
Confusion (Score:4, Insightful)
wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
how media-friendly can you get, damn....
Why not just say that they are high-precision devices that are coordinated from the ground, and that they updated the ground software to something newer and more maintainable? Why do they have to mention a completely unrelated Apple product?
*sigh*
Big Iron (Score:3, Insightful)
I applaud them, though, for spending the money to get this done, and get rid of all the legacy crap. It will seriously pay of in the long run, even against just upgrading the hardware. Big Old Companies still using piles of FORTRAN and COBOL should learn from this.
Wait... only one base providing data refersh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Big Iron (Score:5, Insightful)
Real programmers use FORTRAN, not the quiche-eating boutique language-of-the-month.
Re:Big Iron (Score:3, Insightful)
The other nice thing about doing things this way is that, if the new UNIX code turns out to have nasty bugs, they can always failover to the old system. If the new system is based on an entirely new architecture, then the probability of simultaneous bugs is pleasantly low.
Re:Wait... only one base providing data refersh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen. (Score:2, Insightful)
Truer words were never spoken.
Re:Big Iron (Score:5, Insightful)
PDP-11 (Score:4, Insightful)
I crashed a descendant of a PDP-11 numerous times. And not on purpose. It was an application that may not particularly have been well-written. Butt It would generally crash at least twice weekly and you just hoped you had saved recently.
It was an RT-11 running the CMX 3600 [wikipedia.org] software.
No BSOD but that's because it was not capable of generating a blue screen. It was green or amber. Take your pick.
Re:Wait... only one base providing data refersh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because they didn't mention it in the article doesn't mean a backup site doesn't exist. Also if one doesn't exist then they should be able to create one much easier now that they've update to UNIX.
Man with sensational assumptions like that you should be a
Re:It takes $800 million to replace a mainframe? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more than just the mainframe ... in fact, that was probably the cheap part. The expensive part was developing software that:
A lot was on the line with this -- the Air Force has bombs and cargo pallets that rely on GPS for precision drops. The Army has a GPS-aided artillery system now. The financial sector uses the GPS timing signal for transaction management. A lot of the $800 million was no doubt an investment in testing the system so that, when it finally came online, the poop wouldn't hit the proverbial fan.
Re:Big Iron (Score:3, Insightful)
If only. Instead, the Air Force has to sack 40,000 positions in order to buy new fighters.
Re:wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I propose a new godwin-esque law. First person to mention an apple product in a story that has absolutely NOTHING to do with apple gets 30 lashings.
Re:Confusion (Score:3, Insightful)
You would get one hell of a workout trying to jog with it clipped to your shirt!
Re:Galileo (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Big Iron (Score:5, Insightful)
I said that once too. But then we worked out the cost of maintainance and electrical power, in other words the montly cost to run and found a new system would pay it's own cost in under a year.
Even at home I've unplugged systems simply due to the $0.24 per kilowatt hour cost to power them. (Using an old Pentium III running UNIX as a wifi router and firewall works well but sucks electrical power big time.) I actually saved money by replacing a working system. GPS did the same thing but on t much larger scale.
good-ol' days (Score:2, Insightful)
And it better stay that way.
I don't want a tomahawk crashing into my house accidentally because of some ipod/windows update or ACPI issue in the intel firmware, or since a core had to goto a wait state for some multitasking thing. Sometimes too many features bury the original intent.
Technology isn't a hammer looking for any nail.
Re:Big Iron (Score:2, Insightful)
Heh, you're old.