New US Navy Destroyer Running Linux

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

Management of all onboard equipment is carried out from the ship data center.


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

Most of the servers in the data center are standard IBM production servers under Red Hat Linux, but rubberized containers (Electronic Modular Enclosure) with anti-vibration system, electromagnetic protection and water-cooled were developed and manufactured by Raytheon. In the data center there are 16 containers for more than 235 server racks (in total).

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

The ship is literally stuffed with computers, touchscreens everywhere. The command house resembles NASA's flight 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 carried out via VoIP, except for a few emergency telephones powered by voice energy . Many ship modules are connected to the ship's local network, which is partly routed by optical fiber, partly 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 rockets is sent via TCP or UDP.



There is also a wireless connection on the ship, but this is secret information.

Connecting 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 control of the ship can be carried out remotely, if you establish a satellite channel of communication with the ship control center. But it is not known whether such functionality is provided on this particular destroyer.