Israel wants own technology on F-35 stealth fighters

JERUSALEM, Oct. 3 (Xinhua) -- As Israel plans to buy the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35) from the United States, the Israeli Defense Ministry is seeking American approval to install Israeli-made technology on the stealth fighter jets it buys.

One reason for Israel to ask for the changes is that the version of Israel Air Force (IAF) will be unique and superior in case the aircraft is also sold to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, said a Thursday report by local daily The Jerusalem Post.

"We have unique needs and need to retain our superiority in the region," a senior Israeli defense official was quoted as saying. "To meet these needs, we must be able to install our own systems."

With the Iranian nuclear threat looming, Israel has been looking for further U.S. support on a variety of defense measures, including developing advanced missile defense capabilities, acquiring smart bomb technology and expediting the F-35 sale.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Defense Department notified Congress of plans to sell up to 75 Joint Strike Fighter fifth-generation fighter jets to Israel in a 15.2-billion-U.S. dollar deal for the aircraft, which is expected to be the mainstay of air power in the U.S. and several other nations for decades.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) said it informed Congress last Friday that Israel has asked to buy 25 of the F-35s,with an option to buy an additional 50 at a later date.



In its statement to Congress, the DSCA said the sale would help Israel "develop and maintain a strong self-defense capability" and that the deal would not upset the balance of military power in the region.

The sale would be the first to a country outside the U.S. and the other eight partner nations that are collaborating on the F-35,which is manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the largest U.S. defense contractor, according to The Jerusalem Post.

The first batch of 25 would be the variant of F-35 designed for conventional takeoff from military airfields, but the later 50 could include a version that can land and take off vertically, similar to a helicopter.

If approved by Congress in the next 30 days, Israel will likelysign an official contract with the U.S. Air Force in the coming months and begin receiving the aircraft in 2014, said the report.

While news of the Pentagon approval was positively received in Israeli Defense Ministry, Israeli officials said it was still too early to celebrate since Israel has yet to receive final Pentagon approval to allow the IAF to install Israeli-made systems in the plane.

Israeli demands include installing an advanced radar and conformal fuel tank design for long-range missions made by Israel Aerospace Industries, as well as other electronic and weapons systems that could require changes to the configuration of the aircraft.

The technology issue was discussed last week between the IAF and a team of U.S. military officers from the Joint Strike Fighter program who were in Israel. It was also at the focus of talks Israeli Defense Ministry Director-General Pinhas Buchris held in Washington earlier this month.

The result of the negotiations will be a determining factor in the number of aircraft Israel decides to purchase.

If Israel exercises the vertical option, it would be the first time that the IAF obtains this capability, needed out of fear that Israeli airfields would be paralyzed by enemy missiles in a future conflict and planes would have difficulty taking off in a conventional fashion, said The Jerusalem Post.

Britain, Turkey and Australia are among the eight countries participating in the Joint Strike Fighter program.

Israel enjoys the status of a Security Cooperation Participant after paying 20 million U.S. dollars in 2003 to obtain access to information accumulated during the development of the jet, which will be priced at somewhere between 50 million to 60 million U.S. dollars.

The jet is still under development and is not yet in service. While the jet is expected to be widely used, the program has suffered delays and escalating costs that have been criticized by government auditors.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-10/03/content_10146022.htm

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Israel Deploys New Missile Tracker Against Hamas

NEW YORK -- In yet another signal that the war with Hamas may be intensifying, Israeli media are reporting that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have deployed an experimental new rocket tracking tracking system in the port city of Ashkelon, near the Gaza border.

The IAI MC4 is now in place and operational in Ashkelon reports The Jerusalem Post.

The MC4, a new product of Israel Aerospace Industries, is an outgrowth of the Arrow anti-missile system jointly developed by Israel and the Pentagon.

The Arrow, a successor to the Patriot, was designed as part of President Reagan's Star Wars anti-missile defense originally designed to counter Soviet ICBMs.

While both the Patriot and the Arrow were designed to intercept and neutralize incoming ballistic missiles, the MC4 is designed to counter much smaller missiles such as 122mm ammunitions including Russi an made Katyusha's.

The smaller missiles are quickly launched and have a much more restricted range, giving the attacker the ability to rapidly move to new locations and minimize any counter-measures.

Tracking such highly mobile launch sites had been very difficult as Israel experienced in fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006.


As a result of the Lebanese war, IAI began a crash program to counter such mini-missiles which caused havoc in Haifa in 2006 and now in the Ashdod-Ashkelon region.

According to The Post, the MC4 had been deployed for field testing in Ashkelon last week, but now has been activated for full operation.

Built by the Malam Missile and Space Factory of IAI, the MC4 uses state-of-the-art technology including GPS and camera sensors to scan areas where rocket launch sites may be suspected.

Once a launch is detected, the MC4 pinpoints the site and projected flight path. It also has the ability to back track launches already in progress.

According to Israeli sources, the MC4 gives the IDF the ability to hit rocket launch sites in a manner that did not exist during the Lebanese war.

The MC4 is said to have the ability to triangulate the coordinates of launch sites within a minute of a firing, giving the IDF a new opportunity to respond to "hit and run" missile attacks. It can also pinpoint targets hit, giving emergency medical teams quicker response times.

Neither the US nor Russia currently have such systems in their arsenals say military sources.

Source : http://www.newsmax.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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NASA, Intel And SGI Team Up To Soup Up The Supercomputer

NASA, Intel Corp., and SGI today announced the signing of an agreement establishing intentions to collaborate on significantly increasing the space agency's supercomputer performance and capacity.

Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA will work closely with Intel and SGI to increase computational capabilities for modeling and simulation at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

"Achieving such a monumental increase in performance will help fulfill NASA's increasing need for additional computing capacity and will enable us to provide the computational performance and capacity needed for future missions," said Ames Director S. Pete Worden. "This additional computational performance is necessary to help us achieve breakthrough scientific discoveries."

NASA Ames, Intel and SGI will work together on a project called Pleiades to develop a computational system with a capacity of one Petaflops peak performance (1,000 trillion operations per second) by 2009 and a system with a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10,000 trillion operations per second) by 2012.


"Throughout its history, NASA has sought to explore the most compelling questions about mankind, Earth, and the worlds that await our discovery," said Robert "Bo" Ewald, chief executive officer of SGI.

"SGI is proud to be part of this effort. These groundbreaking new systems powered by SGI and fueled by the latest multi-core Intel processors, offer a platform for new discoveries that will help us all achieve the most promising future for the human race. This effort is important to everyone on this planet."

This collaboration builds on the 2004 deployment of Columbia, which generated a tenfold increase in supercomputing capacity for the agency. Meeting NASA's future mission challenges will require additional computational resources to handle increasingly higher fidelity modeling and simulation. In 2009, NASA expects to increase that computing capability 16 times with the Pleiades project, and by an additional tenfold in 2012.

"Intel, working with SGI, is proud to play an important role in helping NASA expand the pursuit of scientific discovery," said Diane M. Bryant, vice president of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group and general manager or Server Platforms Group, Intel Digital Enterprise Group.

"Systems such as Pleiades challenge the imagination, and guide our exploration of Earth, space, and beyond. As we approach performance that was once thought impossible to achieve, our eyes are opened even wider to the vast possibilities enabled by supercomputing."

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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