Ada Ports Realtime C&C System to MS Windows NT and Pentium
In software manager George Holt's experience, porting Ada code to the latest architectures is not only reasonable technologically and financially, but can be done rapidly. This is true even when the latest technology is the humble PC loaded with the operating system and software that everyone uses. His team's work resulted in the first tactical command and control weapon being run on a PC.
LEXINGTON, Mass. (PRWEB) December 9, 2002 --One of the promises of the Ada programming language is portability. Yet managers of legacy code in Ada, as well as in Fortran or SmallTalk often assume that changing a system's hardware means entirely redesigning the software in a new buzzword language.
In software manager George Holt's experience, porting Ada code to the latest architectures is not only reasonable technologically and financially, but can be done rapidly. This is true even when the latest technology is the humble PC loaded with the operating system and software that everyone uses. His team's work resulted in the first tactical command and control weapon being run on a PC.
Now president of AdaRose, Inc., Holt was a software manager for Mei Technology Corp. when the US Army asked that the Paladin Howitzer Artillery Vehicle be upgraded. In a matter of months his team put together a working prototype for PM Paladin at Picatinny Arsenal, NJ. They proved to the many skeptics among the Army's software managers that they could port the Ada83 code from a proprietary OS to Ada95 running on a PC's Pentium processor under Microsoft Windows NT.
The Paladin is an Army Artillery System mounted on a tracked vehicle (many civilians mistake it for a tank with a huge cannon). It fires 155mm (about 6.2 inch diameter) shells to a range of 30 kilometers. It has onboard navigational and automatic fire control systems, a four-man crew, and weighs approximately 62,000 lbs with a cruising range of 186 miles.
Once awarded the contract, the team kept their approach to acquisitions, using commercial off-the-shelf technologies and open-system architecture designs. As a result, the M109A6 Paladin saved $27.5 million in production costs and reduced the computers' lifecycle costs by 75 percent.
Use of the Ada programming language and strong modular programming techniques allowed the team, many of whom now work for AdaRose in Lexington, Mass., to rehost the legacy Ada software from the three-box distributed system to the new, one-box platform. Once coupled with the use of a Pentium processor and Windows NT, the team, in turn, exported the new software to similar U.S. military equipment, with minimal development costs.
For the complete article, see
http://www.adaic.org/news/adarose.html
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