Swords and Shields: F-35 beats Russians

Russia lags behind the United States in aerospace research and development. It has yet to produce decent competitors to America's two new, fifth-generation fighter jets, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter and the Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor.

The main Russian rivals to the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightnings are the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-35 (NATO designation Fulcrum F) and the Sukhoi Su-35 (NATO designation Flanker). The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-35 is an upgrade of the MiG-29M/M2 and the MiG-29OVT. Both are fourth-generation jets.

The Russian government has been eagerly selling the Sukhoi fighter jets to its friends, so these aircraft are likely to be found in areas where the potential for conflict is greatest, while financing development of the fifth-generation fighter from these export revenues.

Russian analysts like to note that the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning JSF, with a maximum speed of only 1,200 mph, is slower than both the Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker -- maximum speed 1,680 mph -- and the MiG-35 Fulcrum -- maximum speed 1,587 mph. The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning's range of 1,320 miles is below the Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker's range of 2,260 miles as well.

While these measures make the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter seem inferior, they are actually fully consistent with its projected mission: F-35s are designed to operate in tandem with Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptors, which would clear the way for F-35s in real combat.


Moreover, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning JSF's reported service ceiling of around 57,000 feet is superior to the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-35 Fulcrum's 56,000 feet and the Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker's 55,000 feet. The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning JSF also claims a significant advantage in maneuverability because of its smaller size, advanced materials and lightweight construction.

On the record, Russian defense officials insist their Sukhoi and Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG fighters can stand up to their American rivals. But a Russian Defense Ministry expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Pravda.ru that Russia "patches" its fourth-generation modifications to extend their lifespan, while most of its fifth-generation fighter program has largely remained on paper.

In fact, statistics are only the broadest indicators of an aircraft's performance. Combat performance analysis includes maneuverability, stealth, tactics, training, avionics, situation awareness, weapons, countermeasures, interoperability and supportability as major factors.

Stealth is a major discriminator between a 5G fighter like the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter and "Gen 4 plus plus" competitors like the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-35 Fulcrum and the Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker that are essentially modernizations of their respective progenitors, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-29 and the Sukhoi Su-27. No operational Soviet or Russian stealth aircraft has ever been reported to have entered service.

A U.S. analyst who requested anonymity said that while the Russians have some good specific system technologies, their ability to effectively integrate them often lags behind that of the West, and the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter takes integration of off-board intelligence to a step well beyond proven Russian capabilities.

"From the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union until crude oil prices recently rose to $100 per barrel, the ability of Russian aircraft designers to transition their advanced scientific knowledge through RDT&E (research, development, test and evaluation) into production-ready systems has been restricted, with funding available almost solely from sales of its legacy 4th Gen MiG-29 and Su-27 fighters to other countries," the analyst said.

With oil prices collapsing, the challenges of serial production of advanced aerospace weapons systems remains, while the Russian highly skilled military space and aviation industry labor force is pushing 60 -- beyond the life expectancy of an average Russian male.

Sukhoi Su-30 fighters bought by China and India were more advanced than those in Russian air force service, which were procured only in small quantities. Progress in completing the production development of the PAK-FA T-50, Russia's first 5G fighter design, remains dependent on Indian funding.

While notable improvements have been made in the reliability and supportability of Russian aircraft systems, they still fall far short of Western standards. This is particularly true of aircraft engines.

Russia has a long way to go to catch up with the United States in the prestigious new generation fighter competition. Only domestic politics, such as in Europe; declining economic fortunes of potential partners; and high production costs of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter may slow down its triumphant march.

(Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow in Russian and Eurasian studies and international energy security at the Catherine and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute at The Heritage Foundation).

source : http://www.spacewar.com/

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Voltaire Powers World's Most Powerful Supercomputer For NNSA's Los Alamos

Voltaire has announced that the company's InfiniBand-based switches are powering the world's largest supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The revolutionary new supercomputer, nicknamed Roadrunner, achieved sustained performance of 1,026 trillion calculations per second breaking the petaflop barrier and surpassing the performance of every other supercomputer operating today.

Roadrunner has also claimed the number-one position on the new Top500 list. This deal reflected multimillion dollar revenue for Voltaire across late 2007 and Q1 2008.

Roadrunner is a collaborative effort between Voltaire, NNSA, IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory that will primarily be used to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. It will also be used for research into astrophysics, energy, disease pathways and global climate.

"Architecting and deploying a new scale of supercomputer is a tremendous accomplishment. One of the pleasant surprises was the stability of the system as it scaled up in size," said Andy White, Roadrunner Project Director at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "The incredible amount of compute power harnessed by this machine will further the country's national security initiatives and aid in new scientific discoveries."


The supercomputer is built entirely from industry-standard hardware and based on the Linux operating system. Based on a hybrid, triblade design, each node consists of two IBM BladeCenter QS22 blades that contain four Cell processors and an LS21 blade with two AMD Opteron chips. The supercomputer uses a total of 26 Voltaire Grid Director 2012 288-port 20 Gbps InfiniBand switches for the high performance interconnect

Voltaire switches deliver 20 Gbps bandwidths and latencies of less than one microsecond to accelerate application performance by as much as 300% as compared to using Ethernet.

Moreover, the switches' power-efficient design offers lower power and cooling requirements as compared to 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings. Voltaire switches employ a unique design that supports both fibre and copper cabling and the longest distances for InfiniBand.

"Voltaire is honored to partner with NNSA, Los Alamos and IBM to break new ground with the development of the world's first petaflop supercomputer," said Ronnie Kenneth, CEO and chairman, Voltaire.

"By selecting Voltaire InfiniBand-based switches as the interconnect, Los Alamos will be able to capitalize on the supercomputer's intensity to run complex calculations and simulations faster and more efficiently."

Source : http://www.spacedaily.com/

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NASA Supercomputer Ranks Among World's Fastest

NASA's newest supercomputer at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., has garnered the number three spot on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful computers. The announcement was made Nov. 17, 2008 at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC08) in Austin, Texas.

The Pleiades supercomputer is an SGI Altix ICE system with 12,800 Intel Xeon quad-core processors (51,200 cores, 100 racks) running at 487 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops) on the LINPACK benchmark, the industry standard for measuring a system's floating point computing power.

One of the most powerful general-purpose supercomputers ever built, Pleiades also features the world's largest InfiniBand interconnect network.

The LINPACK run also measured electrical power consumption-an increasingly important consideration in high-end computing. Using a total of 2.09 megawatts, or 233 megaflops per watt, Pleiades is among the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world.

"Pleiades represents a significant engineering achievement in several ways," said William Thigpen, Pleiades project manager at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames.


In addition to its power and InfiniBand record, "Pleiades can run NASA codes with minimal modifications, and is compatible with standard desktop engineering workstations so our users can migrate codes easily from their desktops. Users from all key mission areas will have an enormous resource to meet their critical milestones," Thigpen added.

Among the scientific and engineering projects accepted for computer time on Pleiades:

- Extensive simulations of large computational problems for future space vehicle design;

- Development of increasingly detailed models of large-scale dark matter halos and galaxy evolution;

- Running coupled atmosphere-ocean models to assess decadal climate prediction skill for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Over a record-making few weeks, NASA has again deployed one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world," said Eng Lim Goh, chief technology officer at SGI.

"In the race to achieve superior computational power, NASA's knowledge of rapid yet productive deployment is a rare advantage. We are proud to be part of NASA's ongoing journey to show the world what is possible."

"We look forward to seeing the science breakthroughs enabled by Pleiades," said Stephen Wheat, senior director for high performance computing at Intel Corp. "It's rewarding to see that the performance features of the Intel Xeon quad-core processors meet the growing computational challenges of the nation's space program."

The InfiniBand fabric interconnecting Pleiades' 6,400 nodes requires more than 20 miles of double data rate cabling. InfiniBand is also used as the primary local-area network backbone that interconnects computing, storage, and visualization systems, and to facilitate cross-system data file access.

This enables scientific visualization and data analysis to execute concurrently as computer jobs run, producing ultra-high-fidelity results for the enormous datasets used in NASA mission projects.

Pleiades was acquired to augment the space agency's Columbia supercomputer (ranked No. 2 on the Top500 list in November 2004) in supporting NASA's four key mission areas: aeronautics research, exploration systems, science, and space operations.

source : http://www.spacedaily.com/

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Jaguar Upgrade Brings ORNL Closer To Petascale Computing

Upgrades to Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer have more than doubled its performance, increasing the system's ability to deliver far-reaching advances in climate studies, energy research, and a wide range of sciences.

The system recently completed acceptance testing, running applications in climate science, quantum chemistry, combustion science, materials science, nanoscience, fusion science, and astrophysics, as well as benchmarking applications that test supercomputing performance.

The Jaguar system, a Cray XT4 located at ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences, now uses more than 31,000 processing cores to deliver up to 263 trillion calculations a second (or 263 teraflops).

"The Department of Energy's Leadership Computing Facility is putting unprecedented computing power in the hands of leading scientists to enable the next breakthroughs in science and technology," said ORNL Director Thom Mason. "This upgrade is an essential step along that path, bringing us ever closer to the era of petascale computing [systems capable of thousands of trillions of calculations per second]."

Jaguar was among the most powerful computing systems within DOE's Office of Science even before the recent upgrade and has delivered extraordinary results across a broad range of computational sciences.

"The leadership capability at Oak Ridge has been delivering real scientific results," said Michael Strayer, associate director for advanced scientific computing research in the DOE Office of Science.

"Benoit Roux of the University of Chicago used Jaguar to simulate in unprecedented detail the voltage-gated potassium channel, a membrane protein that responds to spikes of electricity by changing shape to allow potassium ions to enter a cell. This work has the potential to help us understand and control certain forms of cardiovascular and neurological disease."

Climate scientists are calculating the potential consequences of greenhouse gas emissions and the potential benefits of limiting these emissions. Combustion scientists are modeling the most efficient designs for engines that use fossil fuels and biofuels.

Fusion researchers are using the system to lead the way toward a clean and plentiful source of electricity. Physicists are exploring the secrets of the universe, illuminating its most elusive mysteries. And materials scientists are searching for the next revolution in technology.

"This is an important advancement," said Thomas Zacharia, ORNL associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences.

"Leading researchers need many orders of magnitude more computing power and infrastructure than we can yet provide, and they have shown us how they will use these new resources, whether it be to predict the consequences of climate change at the regional level, design new materials with predetermined properties, discover new chemical catalysts, explore more efficient ways to manufacture biofuels, or simulate all important aspects of new reactor designs."

"The U.S. Department of Energy and its Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been making huge strides in providing more and more simulation capabilities to advance some of the world's most important scientific and engineering research-and invaluable partners with Cray to push the leading edge of supercomputing," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.

"This upgrade is another big milestone in leadership computing and we, along with many others around the world, are looking forward to learning about the scientific breakthroughs that are borne as a result of this powerful new computing capability."

With its new power, Jaguar will be able to double its contribution to DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program, which is revolutionizing key areas of science by facilitating the world's most challenging computer simulations.

The NCCS will host 30 INCITE projects in 2008 from universities, private industry, and government research laboratories, contributing more than 140 million processor hours on Jaguar.

source : http://www.spacedaily.com/

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