Last weekend I was given a guided tour on the attack submarine HMS Halland by my nephew Marcus, he is Weapons Engineering Officer Lieutenant jg and the CIO of the ship. I and my son Axel (private in the Army) were guided by Marcus.The space inside is cramped, very cramped. You move by crawling and climbing tiny ladders. How they manage to load the torpedoes on board is still a mystery to me.
Anyway Marcus concentrated on the IT equipment. There are several networks in the boat, server racks with blade servers, very special computers, more computers for the hydrophones and lots of laptops. The need for computing power in a modern submarine is phenomenal. In Marcus office, the server room you could squeeze yourself into a chair with a miniscule desk in front of you and that is all. Marcus told us an english colleague envied his spacious office.
The information management system controlling all this hardware 9LV CMS , has lots of interfaces that are totally alien to me but at the heart of the system there are multi function consoles which actually runs under Windows XP from which the submarine warriors carry out their tasks. Here is a schematic picture of the system.
Marcus told us a lot of technical details, but I already forgot most of it (that comes with age), he probably have the entire system on top of his head. (Marcus is a very smart guy, learned himself to read at the age of four, started to play with computers in pre school age and started serious computer programming at ten.)
Some years ago Marcus and the crew on HMS Gotland (a sister ship to HMS Halland) was stationed in USA, playing war games with US navy, here is a awesome photo with Marcus onboard.
HMS Gotland playing search and destroy with aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan outside of San Diego harbour.
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