Kinesix Brings Space Shuttle Graphics To Linux Platform

Kinesix Software, a developer of enterprise and control-room graphics tools for more than 20,000 mission-command and process-control workers, has adapted its flagship Sammi® product to work in Linux environments.

The move will allow commercial Linux users to custom build graphical displays that animate and manage massive volumes of streaming data, according to Kinesix executives.

Kinesix expects its Linux product - which is designed for use with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 for AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor - to appeal to the aerospace, transportation and defense industries, where the company already boasts an extensive roster of customers, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, NASA, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Rockwell International and United Space Alliance.

The new Linux version of Sammi, like the existing Unix and Microsoft ( NT/2000/XP ) iterations of the product, allows large-scale commercial users to create and share live, data-driven displays across dozens or even hundreds of workstations. This means mission-control and process-management workers can create and utilize synchronized, full-color dashboards to view large volumes of critical data, instead of relying on rudimentary numeric readings or basic, conventional GUIs.

According to Kinesix CEO Russ Jamerson, Sammi solves one of the toughest riddles in the mission-control and process-management business: creating complicated dashboards quickly for use across a network. "Designing a single graphic meter to monitor a valve is easy," he says. "Designing multi-layered graphics to monitor hundreds of valves at once - across dozens of separate workstations - is far more difficult. And that's where Sammi comes in."

Jamerson cites NASA's Johnson Space Center as an example of Sammi in action; there, a Unix-based version of Sammi runs 90 percent of the graphical displays for NASA's mission-control operations, including all Space Shuttle flights. He also points to the Hong Kong subway system as an example of Sammi's effectiveness. In Hong Kong, authorities use a Unix version of Sammi as the graphic interface regulating more than 1,000 subway cars at once - thereby helping to control one of the largest subway systems on earth.

The new Sammi for Linux software has been specifically engineered for a 64-bit platform, the most powerful Linux platform on the market. This means that the product can easily keep pace with even the fastest data-processing speeds.

Sammi for Linux is sold as an Application Development Kit featuring three components:

A Format Editor that allows users to custom-create vector-drawing dashboards for almost any mission-control need, without generating any graphics code ( a common problem with other software products and in-house solutions ).

A Runtime Environment manager that coordinates all commands, events and data between networked users and the dashboards created in the Format Editor, all of which result in a live graphical display that is updated in real time.

An Application Programming Interface that manages all network connectivity to a back-end data source and related data transmission and conversion.

The combined benefit of these components, according to Jamerson, "is a heavy-duty product that can animate almost any amount of real-time data, whether it is satellite-telemetry information, nuclear power output or pipeline-control readings."

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