Tough machines

Simon Sharwood sets out to explore what separates the boys from the men in the world of silicon.

We like to think our overclocked, tweaked, and modded machines are hardcore, but  in truth they’re the fluffy dice of computing compared to mission-critical machines in the real world. In the military and the far reaches of the Earth, computers need to operate under extreme conditions. Simon Sharwood sets out to explore what separates the boys from the men in the world of silicon.

It’s easy to forget that our computers were designed to operate within a particular set of environmental factors – temperate, air pressure, humidity, and power among others all define the operating limits of our machines. And like life itself, they’re actually quite fragile. Put your PC in the Simpson desert, or in the arctic wastes, and watch it fail miserably. Which begs the question, how do computers – vital to everything we do these days – survive in environments far more harsh than the office or your bedroom?

The solution is to engineer equipment specifically to withstand extreme environments, toughening them up like Stallone on steroids, but the task of ‘ruggedizing’ PCs and associated equipment like this is dependent on the target environment.

War with the elements

Take, for instance, the military.

Fire the 105mm rifled gun that sits atop Australia’s Leopard tanks and a shock pulse races away from the muzzle at the speed of sound. The pulse lasts just a nanosecond, but subjects everything in the tank to 200 g-forces of stress – ten times the force of a car crash – before dissipating into the atmosphere.

70mm of armor means the tank’s crew scarcely notices the shock pulse. But a tank’s computers aren’t armored, and cop the shock pulse every time the gun fires. The computers also cop the vibration of the tank’s V10 engine, the crunch of every pot-hole, the occasional explosion from enemy fire and the flying boots and rifles of soldiers as they rush in and out of the tank.

And unlike our humble boxes at home or in the office, there’s no room for hardware or software failure. The computers and electronics packed into the tanks must withstand all the force of war, and go on operating as the crew expects them to.

‘The last thing soldiers worry about when they are under fire is the computer,’ says Colonel Mike Brennan of the Defence Materials Organisation. ‘They’re in too much of a hurry for that!’

Yet without the computers and the navigation and communication functions they perform, the crew’s chances of the crew’s survival are greatly diminished. They and countless others around the world in dangerous environments like factories, laboratories and the cold wastes of space rely of a small, elite group within the IT community that think slight differently to the performance crazed sub-group we represent – for these chaps the priority is not on speed, but on stability. For them overclocking is about as cool as crochet and case-modding is for wimps.

Meet the elite

These specialists in hardcore hardware, the computing elite that deal with extreme environments like war and degrees of Kelvin, think this way because making a machine run forever is much harder than making one go faster. And to get it right, they’ll do whatever they can think of to make computers that operate without fail under almost any conditions, then test their machines to ensure they can survive whatever nature can devise.

They set bar high because the environments they work in are unpredictable.

In the military a vehicle computer could be flown almost anywhere in the world on short notice and is expected to function perfectly upon arrival in Antarctica, a jungle or a desert. These are the requirements, these are the demands.

‘We think about what happens to a computer when we clean vehicles because we might use high a pressure hose against the equipment,’ Brennan explains. ‘We take into account the fluids they come in contact with like petroleum products, lubricants, even fly spray. We measure the amount of vibration for wheeled operation vs. tracked operation.’

Others among the elite perform calculations for similar applications. Outfits like Adelaide’s APC Technology figure out what it takes to build custom machines for the mining companies and the military. Sydney’s Amtex is another player, offering specialized hardware and integration services for industrial applications.