Given by Wojtek Furmanski at Internal Briefing on October 1998. Foils prepared October 20 98
Outside Index
Summary of Material
NPAC supports HPC migration of Counter Minefield Simulation CMS with both parallel and distributed computing technologies |
Produced on request for ARL |
Outside Index Summary of Material
We lead academic component (called PET for Programming Environments and Training) of the FMS (Forces Modeling and Simulation) CTA within the DoD HPC Modernization Program. |
Our support comes from ARL (Maryland) and CEWES (Mississippi) MSRCs. |
We work on a set of small FMS PET tasks including
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WebHLA - builds components of DMSO HLA 1.3 on top of Web / Commodity Technologies. Includes:
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Web based Distance Training for FMS users |
HPC RTI - High Performance RTI on top of SPEEDES (in collaboration with Metron, Inc.) |
Parallel CMS - porting CMS to Origin2000 |
Provide support for large minefields (with 1,000,000 mines and more) |
Port current CMS to Origin2000 |
Explore the use Commodity Clusters (Linux+NT) |
Use CMS as M&S testbed for WebHLA components such as Object Web RTI, HPC RTI, DirectX front-ends |
Explore CMS linkages with other FMS projects / users |
Performance critical CMS computation: compare vehicle PDU and mine location in a loop over all mines |
Parallelize using Origin2000 C++ compiler pragmas such as pfor to decompose this loop over processors |
Two approaches being explored:
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CMS code is running on Origin2000 at ARL MSRC and is being optimized/parallelized |
ModSAF based vehicle simulations are running at SGI workstations at Syracuse. |
MBONE connectivity between Syracuse and Aberdeen established and the base CMS demos are working |
Parallel CMS code is compiled and being tested |
Simple 3D visualization is under development. |
We intend to demonstrate very preliminary version of Metacomputing CMS at SC98 this Nov including:
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Our front-end under development includes:
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Support for coarse grain HLA (end of Nov 98) |
Research into fine grain HLA (Winter 98/99) |
Port parallel CMS to commodity clusters (early 99) |
WebHLA based interactive CMS training (mid 99) |
Linkages with FMS CHSSI systems and users : E-ModSAF, HPC RTI, SPEEDES, JSIMS (late 99) |
We will wrap ModSAF and CMS simulation modules as coarse grain HLA federates. |
We will use our Object Web RTI to replace MBONE/multicast by RTI/TCP and to repackage CMS as HLA-compliant federation. |
Initial experiments will use our WebHLA software. Later on, we will also include RPR FOM, and official HLA support for ModSAF and CMS as they become available. |
At the fine grain object level, not clear how to efficiently map mines, components or minefields into SOM objects, FOM objects and federates. |
Brigges et al. suggest that RTI should be extended to accommodate the CMS users needs |
We intend to address it using our Object Web RTI where we control source code and can freely experiment with extensions. |
We are building and experimenting with commodity clusters at Syracuse including Linux and NT nodes |
Our Linux cluster will run Beowulf which supports DSM (Distributed Shared Memory) |
We intend to port Parallel CMS from Origin2000 platform to the DSM platform on our cluster and to experiment with scalability, high availability etc. |
We intend to build Web based training tools for CMS, including various tasks roles such as commander, minefield designer, vehicle driver, breach operation engineer etc. |
WebHLA will offer natural framework including DirectX multimedia front-ends linked with flexible OW-RTI middleware and HPC CMS backends (running on Origin2000 and Clusters) |
We are collaborating with FMS CHSSI and we develop WebHLA based training for emergent FMS systems. |
We will use CMS as a testbed which will effectively create more CMS links with FMS systems and the associated user and application domains such as:
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FMS-2 develops E-ModSAF - a high performance shared memory (Origin2000) based extended version of ModSAF. |
We will develop WebHLA based E-ModSAF training (starting spring 99) |
Parallel CMS could be a natural initial application focus for such a training, given the role of ModSAF support for terrain and vehicle simulation in the current CMS. |
FMS-5 develops HPC RTI - a high performance RTI on top of SPEEDES simulation kernel |
We participate in this project and provide HLA experience based on our Object Web RTI implementation |
We will use CMS as an application testbed for OW-RTI, HPC RTI and their interoperability for Metacomputing simulations. |
We are collaborating with Jeff Wallace, SPAWAR who is member of AMG and technical director of JSIMS Maritime. |
In FMS-4, Wallace develops Parallel IMPORT - a high level high performance simulation language on top of SPEEDES. |
We will develop Parallel IMPORT Training and use CMS as application testbed. |
IMPORT and SPEEDES are used by JSIMS and we will package CMS to federate with JSIMS entities. |
We are exploring the use of WebHLA as a collaboratory framework for Simulation Based Acquisition. |
In particular, we presented several papers during the recent ITEA Workshop on HPC in Aberdeen, MD. |
FMS-2 develops TEMPO/Thema for SDB/SBA applications, to be further strengthen by HPC RTI |
We intend to address countermine device engineering tasks in the Parallel CMS framework, integrated with WebHLA based collaborative authoring towards SBA |
HLA/RTI admits both live and synthetic federates - hence it offers natural support for interactive hands-on distance training in M&S software development |
WebHLA integrates RTI with Web/Commodity technologies and offers attractive Web based framework for distance training |
Trainees, Trainers and Target Systems are mapped on individual WebHLA federates and suitably synchronized via RTI Management Services |
We illustrate FMS Training Space under development on a set of Web browser screendumps |
We use IE4 browser front-end, IIS + JWORB + OW RTI middleware, Access/SQL Server databases, Active Server Pages for dynamic HTML generation |
Current focus is on database support for software documentation (SPEEDES, CMS, RTI, ModSAF) |
Next step: use OW RTI to deliver interactive simulation training (e.g. CMS, ModSAF or SPEEDES as WebHLA training federates) |
Late start for PET FMS (licenses, accounts etc.) in `97 |
Good progress so far in `98 on various fronts |
Object Web RTI operational, parallel CMS in works |
Website in progress: http://bombay.npac.syr.edu/fms |
~15 conf papers, book chapter and book in progress |
SIW Fall 98 paper on WebHLA (SIW-98F-2316) |
WebHLA based Metacomputing (multi-MSRC) FMS Traninng with Parallel CMS as Application Testbed planned for `99 |