New US Navy destroyer powered by Linux

Today, the U.S. Navy plans to launch the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) , the first Zumwalt class ship, to launch a destroyer with guided missile weapons . The most powerful URO destroyer of the new generation is unusual in many respects. It is equipped with missiles, guns and anti-aircraft installations, so that it can attack targets at sea and on the coast, shoot down planes and provide fire support to troops. But the most unusual is that the ship works completely under Linux.

All onboard equipment is controlled from the ship's data center.



For this destroyer, 6 million lines of software code were written. The cost of building the ship amounted to $ 3.5 billion, a small part of this money went to pay for the work of programmers. Much of the written software is used in computer systems of other ships of the Zumwalt class. The second destroyer of this class USS Michael Monsoor has already begun to collect. The project is led by one of the largest military contractors - Raytheon Corporation.

Most of the servers in the data center are standard IBM-made servers under Red Hat Linux, but Raytheon designed and manufactured the rubberized containers (Electronic Modular Enclosure) with anti-vibration system, electromagnetic protection and water cooling. The data center has 16 containers under 235-odd server racks (in total).

The journalist of the site Ars Technica visited the ship with a guided tour and wrote an excellent report on the results of the trip. He also mentioned a curious fact: the ship's captain is James Kirk, this is his real name .

The ship is literally packed with computer equipment, touchscreens everywhere. Command felling resembles NASA's mission control center. In the photo below, the screens show the launch of a rocket.


_{Larger version of the picture , you can read the inscriptions on the screens.}

Here is a diagram of the USS Zumwalt operations center.



Almost all communications on the destroyer are done via VoIP, except for a few emergency phones powered by voice energy. Many modules of the ship are connected to the ship's local area network, which is partially laid by fiber, partially by copper cables. Both sensors and weapons are connected to the network, everything works according to standard Internet protocols. That is, the command to launch missiles is sent via TCP or UDP.



The ship also has wireless, but this is classified information.

Connection to the network of rocket mines, anti-aircraft guns and other equipment is carried out through adapters - single-board computers running Lynx OS, a real-time operating system.

Theoretically, the ship can be controlled remotely if you install a satellite communication channel with the ship control center. But it is not known whether such functionality is provided on this particular destroyer.