tagged w/ Threat Simulators
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The first passenger plane equipped with a system to repel shoulder-fired missiles successfully completed its flight, a British defense and aerospace company announced.
The JetEye infrared missile-defense system was tested on an American Airlines flight that took off July 11, according to a statement from BAE Systems. The plane flew from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport in California, the company said.
The JetEye system works by detecting the heat-seeking missiles and then firing a laser, which diverts the missile. American Airlines refused to make the system mandatory on all trips but agreed to cooperate with the tests.
The flight represents the final phase of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Counter-Man-Portable Air Defense System program, designed to test the suitability of missile-protection equipment for commercial aircraft.
Previously, the technology was successfully evaluated on an American Airlines test aircraft and an ABX Air Inc. cargo aircraft.
The missile-protection equipment will be installed on two more American Airlines 767-200 aircraft for daily cross-country flights through March. Engineers will evaluate the system's maintainability and reliability, as well as its suitability for the airline industry. No missiles will be fired at these flights.
"BAE Systems worked closely with DHS and the airline industry to develop an effective response to potential terrorist threats," said Burt Keirstead, JetEye program director for BAE Systems in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Homeland Security officials said in January that there is no specific threat of these weapons being fired at planes.
However, Taliban forces successfully used shoulder-fired missiles against Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan. Terrorists tried in 2002 to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet in Kenya with them.
Insurgents hit a cargo plane in Baghdad the following year, but the plane landed safely.
Experts say that about 500,000 to 700,000 shoulder-fired missile weapons have been produced worldwide, and some have been purchased in Middle Eastern and Central Asian arms markets for as little as $5,000.
Since 2003, Congress has pressured Homeland Security to adapt military anti-MANPADS technology to commercial aviation.
BAE Systems, based in Farnborough, England, works with American Airlines Maintenance and Engineering Services, which provided the test aircraft and engineering services for the development of JetEye.
DHS awarded BAE Systems a $29 million contract in January for this final evaluation phase of the program, which calls for the planes to log about 7,000 flight hours.
Northrop Grumman, a defense company with its own system to protect planes from portable missiles, urged the Defense Department in March to install its system on commercial flights that take soldiers and equipment to war zones.
Jack Pledger, a Northrop Grumman executive, said in March that 27 terrorist groups are believed to possess shoulder-fired weapons, that aircraft are vulnerable to the missiles within 25 miles of airports and that one missile incident could have catastrophic effects on the U.S. economy.
In March, the Northrop system concluded a 14-month test during which anti-missile systems were installed on 11 FedEx cargo planes that flew 4,500 flights.The first passenger plane equipped with a system to repel shoulder-fired missiles... more
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An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.
Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.
The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.
By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering,
The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations
Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.
Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.
By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States' supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for... more
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