PROJECT FORM

INSTITUTION NAME: Syracuse University

WORKPAGE TITLE: WebHLA

PROJECT TITLE: Training Federates

POC: David Bernholdt, bernholdt@npac.syr.edu, (315) 443-3857, fax (315) 443-1973

CTA or PEI: Forces Modeling and Simulation (FMS)

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: This project receives the training materials for the individual CHSSI modules and it develops suitable wrappers and/or APIs that encapsulate such modules as HLA federates, conforming to some training FOM to be also prototyped and gradually refined in the course of this project. In such HLA based interactive training framework, individual software modules, students, mentors and agents are all mapped on HLA federates and can participate in training sessions, organized as real-time multiplayer gaming services. Students can run realtime demos associated with the individual modules and suitably instrumented to enable the real-time control of the simulation parameters. Initial target of this project, starting in Year 3, will be the SPEEDES module, already preprocessed by the CHSSI Training Materials project in Year 2. We will construct real-time interactive remote interface to selected SPEEDES demos such as qnet using the host router and the external module components of the system. A set of Web based interactive controls will be provided to monitor the system response to varying parameters such as the type of synchronization algorithm (Fixed or Breathing, Time Buckets or Time Warp), length of the message queue to be processed in the risk-free mode, bounds on the frequency of the Global Virtual Time calculation etc. Such control will be useful both for students to build understaning of the SPEEDES operation and for the developers of SPEEDES based simulations such as Wargame2000 to fine tune the system parameters for the individual architectures and problem domains.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES: Wrap CHSSI modules as HLA federates; deliver interactive WebHLA based FMS training courses.

DELIVERABLES: HLA training FOM; a set of training federates that wrap CHSSI modules and conform to the training FOM; WebHLA based federation that offers Web based training for the FMS modules.

CUSTOMERS/END USERS: Developers of advanced simulations that utilize FMS CHSSI modules and need to analyze the module response to control parameters and/or to calibrate and fine-tune the parameters for specific problem domain; Students who want to develop the understanding of the FMS CHSSI modules in the hands-on interactive training mode.

BENEFIT TO THE WARFIGHTER: HLA enforces interoperability between diverse simulation models and enables the integration of large scale realistic simulations of relevance to the warfighter. The training FOM approach proposed here will enforce the interoperability of FMS CHSSI modules and it will popularize the HLA concepts among the FMS developers and users. The end result will be a better more powerful M&S framework that integrates HPC and HLA towards powerful simulations for analysis, training and acquisition.

PROJECT DEPENDENCIES AND SCOPE: This project builds on the results of the CHSSI Training Materials project that performs the initial analysis of the available materials, demos and the source codes for the individual FMS CHSSI modules.

RISK ELEMENT: Some advanced high performance characteristics of the FMS modules can be difficult to probe in the low bandwidth Internet training mode. Wrapping some CHSSI codes as HLA federates might turn out to be too ambitious task within the PET funding model. Competition between some FMS CHSSI teams and DMSO might lead to political difficulties when trying to enforce HLA.

REQUIRED FUNDING LEVEL:

Year 3: SPEEDES as Training Federate $50K

Year 4: E-ModSAF and TEMPO/Thema as Training Federates $50K

Year 5: IMPORT and HPC RTI as Training Federates $50K