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| News Brief |
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| SUSE Linux in Action During the Salvage of the "Kursk" | ||||
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11/26/2001 — Dr. Rotthäuser and Dr. Hagemeister from Ingenieursgesellschaft IgH, based in Essen (Germany), were on board among the European salvage team of 52, who lifted the Kursk from its watery grave 108 meters below sea level in October 2001. Their company's control software made sure that the Russian nuclear submarine remained in a stable, safe position during the salvage despite heavy seas. In June 2001, the Dutch salvage company Mammoet first entrusted IgH the mathematical simulation of the wave compensators. Its purpose was a balanced tightening of the cables while the ship is being lifted. Based on this model, the IgH then developed the entire control and software concept for the salvage and implemented it together with experts from the Dutch company Raster. SUSE Linux was employed as the platform for the simulation. The main reasons for this choice were its stability, the availability of excellent software, and above all, its network capabilities. IgH has been using SUSE Linux for the past six years in servers and desktops. Thus, the company was able to acquire a lot of experience in the application, system administration, and programming. The software that controlled the mechanism on the deck of the salvage vessel is written in Delphi and runs under Windows 2000. Special features of the IgH control software include the automatic calculation of the optimum load distribution in the 26 cables used for lifting the Kursk and a specially developed control algorithm for adjusting the gas energy in the individual wave compensators corresponding to the optimum load. This procedure constituted the basis for safe salvage operations in the face of waves towering up to 3 meters. The command center hosted five identical control systems with dual-boot option (Linux/Win2000). The computers were arranged redundantly and connected with Ethernet. The communication between the simulation program and the control program worked smoothly via TCP/IP. Samba was used to connect the Linux hosts to the Windows workgroups. In retrospective, the system proved to be a highly successful implementation of a heterogeneous network structure that allowed the advantages of both platforms to be used in the best way possible. Press Contact: |
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