I wonder what sort of security measures are in place to protect the server area from unauthorized access in the cargo hold entrance.
Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350
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Re: Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350
#142Later in the video at 4:48 approx he demonstrates the nav computer GUI in the cockpit and I cringed when he used the touchscreen and there was a lag of about 2-5 (!) seconds after every interaction. My... god.... I kind of almost heard the mechanical drive seeking and reading and searching the heavily fragmented map data...
This screen (Onboard Information System) is run from from a laptop that is behind the seat, that's not directly part of the aircraft systems
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Re: Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Foreflight on an iPad is fully certified
As a flight bag / printed material replacement. Try tapping on Belfast Muni airport (KBST in ICAO) in Maine in ForeFlight, and the dataset consolidation will pull Bost airbase (BST in IATA) in Afghanistan. While it’s fairly obvious that you’re not going to Central Asia in your Piper, imagine pulling the 3x longer runway into your FMS and have it compute landing settings or add it as emergency alternate for your A350…
Wow, just tried this and can confirm it pulls the wrong airport info. Interestingly searching KBST directly does not have this issue.
Re: Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350
#144I always thought that location in the movie Flightplan was made up. I guess the size was exaggerated but it’s otherwise pretty close.
Re: Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350
#145I wonder would it be possible for these servers to be replaced by cloud infra? Then they can save space and only have network connection.
The flight servers are technically already in the cloud, when it’s up 35,000 feet in the air.
Re: Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replaceable, modular designs, space for modifications, etc. Also some sensors are pretty big (laser gyroscopes, for example which are part of ADIRU - air & intertial reference system. Then you have the central computer clusters which might be separated physically (several computers running in a setup somewhat similar to statically assigned kubernetes) which run all kinds of software from lights management through nav…
>(several computers running in a setup somewhat similar to statically assigned kubernetes) This description of a server room makes me feel old.
Well, which explanation would you prefer then? JES3, which is the closest extant example of such tech?
I'm comparing it to statically assigned k8s not because it's manually assigned applications, but because it's a cluster system where the equivalent of k8s scheduler was run offline to resolve various performance and deadline constraints, both between specific application threads on the cluster, and between devices on the AFDX (modified ethernet) network that are managed from said cluster.
Comparing ARINC-653 partitions to k8s pods and the overall setup of typical IMA cluster with k8s makes for simplest way, IMO, to describe the setup to people who have some experience with servers and cloud, but none with aviation embedded :)
Re: Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350
#147Even assuming quadruple redundancy, seven nines uptime and resilience to extreme conditions and cosmic rays, this looks way way bigger than it should be. One explanation could be that the certification process for anything aviation related is so expensive and slow that we're actually looking at tech from 15+ years ago.
> this looks way way bigger than it should be.
I worked on the software for one of these A350 server blades nearly a decade ago, and I held the same belief at the time. There's some adage that system complexity grows to fill the organizational bureaucracy overseeing it, and that is my best explanation for the bloat. My employer (a contractor of Airbus) had offices in France, India, and the United States. Naturally, each office had to be in charge of their own separate blade(s), even if it was probably not optimal in terms of the overall system design to partition it that way.
Re: Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where's the commercial benefit though? The cost of certification is huge so upgrades after initial certification don't happen unless the tech has big cost benefit (or safety, which is also cost at second order). Hence A320 still running on Motorola 68000 of Sega Genesis etc fame. And 737max having a top panel from the 60s.
I thought you where joking about the Motorola 68000 in the A320, but nope, it’s part of the flight control system.
Honeywell FMS systems use AMD29000 to this day, including in new designs, and Honeywell even bought the licenses to operate as fabless manufacturer for it.
The reason is simple - they need stability of parts supply with minimal recertification costs, and in this case it means that by having an already certified cpu (AMD 29k) and full manufacturing line capability for it, they don't have to face issues with vendor deciding to scrap a line (like another popular design, i860, had to deal with) or having to constantly recertify and update for newer parts.
And quite often the computing requirements didn't really grow
Re: Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because it is 10 year old older hardware but thoroughly tested. Using Chrome/JS/CSS on the latest Ryzen might be neat but when you need to transport 300 passengers daily around there is other sort of concerns then taking up 3 folks to the ISS every 6 months.
In an emergency situation, an unresponsive and unintuitive GUI may be very dangerous. Especially if pilots forget how to use it because they're using the iPad day to day but right now it's rebooting to install an update. Like, I get the argument for certification but maybe the requirements should have a minimum level of performance. If that's not possible maybe we should find a different equilibrium.
There are requirements for performance - appropriate to the function.
The electronic flight bag interface is not used in emergencies, one of its main uses is in planning and submitting flight plans before takeoff, and it's generally not used for actively flying the plane.
Re: Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I have been in a few server rooms that sound like a jet engine taking off. This server room actually sounds like a jet engine taking off.
More like the sound of the auxiliary power unit at the back of the plane ;)
Yeah, I meant later on, when the jet engine is actually taking off.