Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN), with 2007 sales of $21.3 billion, is an industry leader in defense and government electronics, space, information technology, technical services, and business and special mission aircraft. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 72,000 people worldwide. Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon, is a leader in joint battlespace integration. It serves as the prime mission systems integrator for all electronic and combat systems for the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer program.
IBM is the world's largest information technology services and consulting services organization, with 2007 revenue of $98.7 billion. As a business, IBM delivers innovation that matters for its clients. As a global enterprise, it values innovation that matters for itself and for the world, addressing some of society's most complex problems with game-changing business and technology innovation. IBM's collaboration with Raytheon is one example of its innovative approach to addressing challenges facing government and commercial organizations alike.
The U.S. Navy required assistance building an open-architecture shipboard enterprise network that would allow seamless integration of all on-board systems. The system, called the Zumwalt Total Ship Computing Environment (TSCE), would give the Navy increased ability to use open-source software and commercial-off-the-shelf hardware to build a ship wide infrastructure that supported all ship functions, including combat systems. The computing environment for this complex set of applications required deterministic low latency (real-time) performance. Although Linux's Real Time capabilities were insufficient in 2005, a vibrant RT community was forming, which welcomed IBM's participation and contributions. The project schedule was aggressive: time from the formation of the IBM RT team to the first release was just over one year.
Raytheon approached the project by envisioning a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) computing infrastructure comprised of hundreds of x86 servers, all providing RT response from an IBM-developed industry standard RT Java environment running on Linux. This solution would permit developers to write standard Java code that provides the RT response required for the Zumwalt program, reducing the need for special-purpose and legacy languages such as Ada, since the US Navy demanded the use of ubiquitous industry standards with vibrant communities and ecosystems (such as Linux and Java) to simplify complex projects such as the Zumwalt program. "However, when the project started some years ago, we were quite aware that it demanded capabilities that were well in excess of anything Linux had ever provided," said Keith Bright, program director of IBM's Linux Technology Center, in Austin. Furthermore, these capabilities were also well in excess of what the community was willing to support at that time. "Choosing a partner capable of addressing such challenges was therefore critically important," said Bright.
There were three requirements that drove IBM's search for a vendor. First, it needed a free and open source software (FOSS) environment with strong market acceptance; secondly, IBM needed to modify the environment to provide tens-of-microsecond response times; and, finally, the project required long-term vendor support.
The first requirement clearly pointed to the Linux kernel. The fact that Red Hat's Ingo Molnar had recently launched an aggressive RT project for the Linux kernel helped satisfy the second requirement, as IBM and others could contribute to this project using their particular strengths. For example, IBM's special areas of time-keeping, security, validation, performance, scalability, and read-copy-update (RCU) capabilities were critical to the project. Given the quick growth and progress of this new RT Linux community, an IBM-assembled skunkworks team with Ted Tso as lead architect stood a good chance of meeting the Zumwalt program's performance and quality needs, even in the face of this program's aggressive schedule. Finally, the third requirement favored the Linux vendor with the greatest critical mass and staying power - namely Red Hat.
Red Hat was critical to the success of this solution. Raytheon and IBM depended on Red Hat's Ingo Molnar's ability to lead a cutting-edge Linux-kernel project involving a large number of developers from a wide variety of organizations, including academics, industrial companies, other Linux distributions, and system vendors such as IBM. "We expect that the integration of community-developed code into the recently announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux MRG RT Linux distribution will be a key enabler for future projects, permitting a more traditional support model."
The Zumwalt utilizes an open-architecture shipboard enterprise network that enables seamless integration of all on-board systems. Zumwalt's computing infrastructure provides computer support for combat systems, internal and external communications, ship control, maintenance, logistics, training, and other deployment functions. The RT Linux kernel provides tens of microseconds response times. IBM's RT Java provides millisecond response times for garbage-collected code, and sub-100-microsecond response times for "real-time standard Java" (RTSJ) code. The natural integration of the RT code with the garbage collector enables Java's rich class libraries to be used in RT code, but without source code modifications, preserving Java's productivity advantages.
This project was first of a kind, demonstrating that Linux is now capable of supporting some of the most challenging RT applications, while still running traditional mainstream software on the same computer system at the same time. "We believe that this project also demonstrates that RT processing is going mainstream," said Bright. The overall impact included improved RT programmer productivity, reduced RT application development times, and reduced overall cost - for example, Zumwalt ramped up to 1,200 software professionals in more than 30 sites in less than two years. "It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to staff this project that quickly - or to maintain that staffing - if we'd used specialized proprietary technologies that required extensive education and training," said Bright. "The ability to staff up a project so quickly provides Raytheon with an important competitive advantage.
Additionally, basing the Zumwalt program on Ingo Molnar 's PREEMPT_RT project, which IBM's Linux Technology Center could build upon, permitted use of a single operating-system environment throughout, greatly simplifying deployment. "Without the PREEMPT_RT project, meeting the Zumwalt program's schedule would either have required a proprietary RT operating system that lacked Linux's rich ecosystem, or would have required a mixed environment, with all the complex integration effort that such a mixed environment entails," said Bright. "Again, Red Hat was the obvious choice."
IBM used Red Hat consulting services in order to get fixes and features in areas of special Red Hat expertise as needed, and, additionally, to help ensure that the RT modifications - IBM's Red Hat's, and those of the rest of the Linux community – required for this project went upstream into Linus Torvald's mainline Linux source tree. "In addition to being the right thing to do, it was also a U.S. Navy requirement to push the code upstream," said Bright. "This guarantees that future projects will be able to reap the benefits of the good work done by the community."
IBM believes that there are three critical things companies must do to get leading-edge capabilities from FOSS projects: participate, participate, and participate. "If we all contribute to our common goals, there is no limit to what we can accomplish together," said Bright. And the resulting technology from this particular project is an outstanding example of combining commercial opportunities, Linux technology, and the Linux community. "The participation of Red Hat, IBM, Raytheon, and others within Linux community adds value for everyone, throughout society at large," said Bright. "Even though the first release to Raytheon was a special one-off fork supported by IBM, the RT technology is being accepted into the mainline kernel, where it will be readily available to everyone. This project has been an exciting technology collaboration, in which we have been proud and happy to participate."
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