Putting a Raspberry Pi in jelly, and other technology behind Bloodhound SSC

John Abel, Oracle's head of technology and cloud UK, Ireland and Israel, explains why the software giant is involved in the new land-speed world record attempt

The Bloodhound SSC, the project to break the land speed world record in 2018, is also about inspiring the next generation of IT workers.

John Abel, head of technology and cloud UK, Ireland and Israel at Oracle, gave that opinion during Computing's recent Cloud and Infrastructure Summit.

"This project is about needing more talent in IT," said Abel. "[Building a car that can reach] 1000mph is the personal goal of team. The other is to create the next generation of scientists. The biggest challenge I have as an employer is finding talent," he added.

Abel continued, giving some stats of the car's potential performance. "It's about getting a generation inspired. This car will go faster than a speeding bullet. When it breaks the sound barrier, the noise willl be heard over 25 miles away. It hat a Eurofighter jet engine and three rockets. It has 135,000 brake horsepower. It takes 55 seconds to get to 1,000 mph."

He then discussed the technology which facilitates the enormous engineering effort involved in designing and building such a car. And just about all of its data is being made freely available.

"All the tech we use is open source, all the data is being made available. Imagine if we had the moon landing data now, and if students could still use thar data. The data doesn't age, but the technology that can use it improves.

"It's about openness to everyone. In the UK 129,000 students will get educated about this car. It's a real accolade to that team that they've really focused on STEM."

He explained that Oracle involved itself in the project in early 2017.

"All the software we use on this project has to be made available on the web, and all the hardware needs to be readily available on the high street. That means there's no barrier to the education prospects, all the data is available to all. And there'll be an Oracle database application capturing data from the car when do our runs in desert next year.

"There's lots of stuff we don't have to worry about any more thanks to cloud. The car has over 500 sensors all down its bodywork capturing pressure data. We're expecting that about 1,000 transactions per second to be recorded, that's about 2GB of data on every run, and we'll do about 60-70 runs.

"We're streaming the data off the car using a Raspberry Pi, which we'll protect it by putting it into jelly. It's all programmed using open source, and it runs Linux."

He added that the team are also putting GoPro cameras into the cockpit, so students, and anyone else, can view the driver's experience as it breaks the world record.

"My 11 year-old thought that was cool because it felt like gaming," said Abel, emphasising the drive to engage youth.

"When I text kids they come back to me on WhatsApp. They don't live in my world. So we're trying to get them excited about what we can do, to build their relationship to the businesses of the future," concluded Abel.

At the same event, a panel of experts also discussed the future of cloud.