Air Force uses SGI servers for flight simulator

Oct. 1, 2005
Leaders at the U.S. Air Force Air Education and Training Command Facility at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Ariz., needed a night-vision goggle (NVG) simulator to train F-16 pilots.

Leaders at the U.S. Air Force Air Education and Training Command Facility at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Ariz., needed a night-vision goggle (NVG) simulator to train F-16 pilots.

They found a solution developed by Lockheed Martin Services Inc., MultiGen-Paradigm, and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), Mountain View, Calif.

Pilot depth perception suffers when wearing night-vision goggles; these devices offer no peripheral vision, and their 40-degree circular field of view forces the viewer to turn his head continually from side to side. Intense ambient light from the moon, stars, and city lights also can blind pilots.

To address this training requirement, the three companies created the F-16 Networked Training Center, with a high-fidelity NVG training capability that precisely simulates what F-16 pilots actually see through night-vision goggles when they fly nighttime missions.

“The seamless integration of the high-fidelity NVG simulation system with our existing F-16 flight simulators has greatly increased the flight safety and mission effectiveness of F-16 pilots,” says Major Jonathan Beasley, program manager in the Networked Training Center-Luke (NTC-L).

“This provides us with the highest fidelity F-16 full-mission training system for day, night, and all-weather operations. This new NVG simulation system simultaneously processes 3-D graphics, 2-D imagery, and even subtle visual effects such as lunar shading.”

Powering the flight simulators are the Silicon Graphics Onyx family of graphics supercomputers. For more information, see www.sgi.com.

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