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danengel · Aug 8, 2003, 01:47 PM

I hope this isn't old news already: The U.S. Navy buys 260 XServes for real-time image processing. They want to put Yellow Dog Linux on it! Why not keep OS X? I tried YDL once, it sucked.

The article is here .

Angus_D · Aug 8, 2003, 02:00 PM

The US Navy isn't trying to run a desktop operating system for all their submariners to surf the net and e-mail home from the bottom of the ocean, you know.

Anyway, this belongs in Lounge.

danengel · Aug 8, 2003, 03:08 PM

Anyway, this belongs in Lounge.

I posted it here because I want to discuss only the operating system.

The US Navy isn't trying to run a desktop operating system for all their submariners to surf the net and e-mail home from the bottom of the ocean, you know.

Can't you just drop the GUI of OS X by booting into Darwin? Then you've got the full power of the machine with an OS that's supporting everything, not like Linux.

Angus_D · Aug 8, 2003, 03:31 PM

Originally posted by danengel:
Can't you just drop the GUI of OS X by booting into Darwin? Then you've got the full power of the machine with an OS that's supporting everything, not like Linux.

But then, why bother? Darwin isn't particularly exciting as a *nix distro in its own right.

stew · Aug 8, 2003, 03:32 PM

Linux has a few advantages over Mac OS X:
Mac OS X has a static vnode limit, where Linux handles that dynamically. Mac OS X has a limit of 100 processes per user, Linux hasn't. And, the reason that the Navy gave: They had existing Linux software, why port it to OS X?

PS: As they are obivously not using Mac OS X, why is this thread in the Mac OS X forum?

jasong · Aug 8, 2003, 03:48 PM

But is the XServe really that much better/cheaper than what could be built on the X86 platform once you discount OS X?

Or is this just a sleeper attack to get OS X into the door?

-- Jason

Angus_D · Aug 8, 2003, 04:02 PM

Originally posted by jasong:
But is the XServe really that much better/cheaper than what could be built on the X86 platform once you discount OS X?

Why don't you actually read the PR?

From http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/news/2003-08-06.shtml:
This combination provides a solution twice as dense, less power consumptive, and higher performance than the previous solution at a similar cost.

utidjian · Aug 9, 2003, 08:56 AM

Originally posted by Angus_D:
This combination provides a solution twice as dense, less power consumptive, and higher performance than the previous solution at a similar cost.

I would speculate that the power consumption itself is not so much of a problem... but the problem of heat dissipation that would result. I speculate that a nuclear submarine has plenty of electrical power on tap but that it is pretty difficult to dump the extra heat created by a higher power consumption architecture. IOW the Navy got more bang per BTU by going with the Xserve. Not like they can just plug in another AC unit and hang it out a window.

Gavin · Aug 9, 2003, 06:59 PM

Let's not forget the space constraints inside a sub.

The xserve has very nice front access for everything. You can back the rack again a wall and still get at the guts.

Other rack machines make you walk around to the back to get at drives, etc. or pull the whole box out and work on on a table (or the floor).

Price per unit the rack case design competes well.

Also for image processing you want a nice fat altavec. Any cost savings from an intel based system would be more than eaten by the high end graphics card you'ld have to buy to make up for the lack of the vector unit.

besson3c · Aug 9, 2003, 10:10 PM

you can install software updates in Linux without having to restart the computer.

I know you *could* do this in OS X, but it's not really the norm.

Superchicken · Aug 10, 2003, 12:13 AM

Who cares so long as they bought Apple products

Don Pickett · Aug 10, 2003, 01:24 AM

Originally posted by jasong:
But is the XServe really that much better/cheaper than what could be built on the X86 platform once you discount OS X?

Or is this just a sleeper attack to get OS X into the door?

-- Jason

This has been discussed at length on Slashdot. The XServes are running image recognition software, which makes heavy use of the AltiVec units in the G4. Search Slashdot for the thread if you're interested.

Eug · Aug 10, 2003, 08:02 AM

This has been discussed at length on Slashdot. The XServes are running image recognition software, which makes heavy use of the AltiVec units in the G4. Search Slashdot for the thread if you're interested.

Slashdot is not correct, according to this guy at Ars:

---

"As someone who works in close proximity with those XServes, (I write some of the software which controls them as a whole, not the software running on each one, though I'm friends with the people who do) let me tell you that this is one time going Apple was cheaper than the alternative. (Which wasn't x86)

Oh, and they aren't image processing, they are Beamformers (a type of signal processing for sonar) just FYI.

Not only that, but we've moved most of the rest of the sonar system to Linux too (Redhat 7.2 in this case) Only a few specialized chassis are running anything else.

Don't worry, none of this information is classified, I'm not going to get in trouble."

---

"Well, some of that information I don't have, some I can't say but I can tell you that we use anywhere from 4-10 (currently) dual processor boxes to make one beamformer. (Depending on the array being processed) The only performance information I have is that they are fast enough to do what custom hardware used to do. Of course the custom hardware is several generations old, and our x86 linux boxes are also lightyears faster. The big deal was mostly the real time kernel on Yellow Dog I believe."

---

By the way, I read that Mac OS X is not as yet certified as "secure". It was apparently submitted a year ago, but without approval yet. Windows 2000 is "secure", and was supposedly given approval a few months after approval. So perhaps Apple failed with its first submission of Mac OS X?