FMS Core Support ---------------- During the last three months, we were involved in the following activities within the core FMS support: 1. We chaired FMS HLA session and we presented WebHLA paper at the ASTC'99 (Advanced Simulation Technologies Conference) organized by Society of Computer Simulations in April 99 in San Diego. We also participated in the PDES (Parallel Distributed Event Simulations) Users Group meeting, held during this conference. PDES is led by Jeff Wallace of SPAWAR with the goal of promoting SPEEDES as a DoD-wide standard for HPC simulations. Current PDES members include the growing user community of SPEEDES, including Wargame2000 at JNTF, COlorado Springs, CO and JSIMS Enterprise in Orlando, FL. 2. We were asked by Larry Peterson of SPAWAR to act as external technical reviewer of the SPEEDES based Parallel IMPORT system under development by the CHSSI project FMS-3 lead by SPAWAR and implemented by Metron. This included a visit to SPAWAR by mid April to conduct tests of Parallel IMPORT software, inspection of Parallel IMPORT source code, development of the external review report, and another visit to SPAWAR end of April to participate in the actual beta test review. 3. We presented another WebHLA paper in the FMS session at the DoD HPC Users Group Conference at Monterey, CA in June. 4. We were also asked by Bill Smith of NRL to act as external technical reviewer of the SPEEDES based Parallel Navy Simulation System under development by the CHSSI project FMS-3 at NRL. This involved visit to Metron end of May, installation of SPEEDES at ARL, CEWES and NRL, running an extensive test suite, interacting with the Metron team, and developing the written (30-page) report. 5. We were asked early June by Ft. Belvoir to pass them the latest version of our Parallel CMS software. In particular, they are interested in the HLA support we provided for this DIS simulation. We are currently in the final stage of packaging, testing and minimally documenting all WebHLA components that are to be included in this release: JWORB, OWRTI, RtiCap, Parallel CMS module, WebFlow, OMBuilder, SimVis, JDIS, PDUDB. 6. By end of June, we presented FMS tutorial and lab at the Jackson State University HPC Summer Institute. For the lab purposes, we installed the latest version of JWORB+OWRTI on all 20+ computers of the JSU lab and we involved students in several interactive collaborative activities such as WebFlow graph authoring, playing DirectX+OWRTI multiplayer games such as Jager Donuts, and monitoring a Parallel CMS simulation, replayed from the event database and interactively viewed on multiple PC screens via our SimVis battlefied visualizer. 7. After the JSU event, we visited CEWES to meet with Jay Cliburn and Mitch Baker and discuss security issues related to our planned Metacomputing experiments - see below for more details. Enforcing Scalability of Parallel CMS ------------------------------------- We are pursuing this task along several complementary lines of attack: 1. We need to understand the CMS source code in more detail to be able to re-engineer the inner simulation loop. For this purpose, we will need some help from Ft. Belvoir engieers. In turn, they suggested we upgrade our CMS to the latest version they use right now so that both groups work with the same version. We just completed the (significant) upgrade and we start exploring the new CMS software. 2. In parallel with the ongoing parallelization effort, based on SGI compiler pragmas, we intend to explore alternative parallelization techniques such as the use of SPEEDES as the core CMS engine. We developed some SPEEDES know-how recently in the process of acting as external reviewer for the CHSSI projects and we realized that we could use this system - which scales well over the broad range of processor arrays - as the Parallel CMS framework. We are currently analysing some SPEEDES demos and the engine source code with the goal of assessing its adequacy for scalable parallel CMS. 3. One possible conclusion of our SPEEDES-for-CMS analysis discussed above could be that the SPEEDES core parallelization techniques (based exclusively on fully portable UNIX fork and shmem constructs) could be useful for our purposes but the whole SPEEDES system is in fact too heavy and its numerous high level features are too redundant with what already exists in the CMS code. For this purpose, we are constructing a micro-SPEEDES like kernel that uses fork and shem only but it is otherwise an empty shell, ready to be attached and parallelize any object based event driven simulation. HLA Integration for HPC Applications applied to CMS --------------------------------------------------- This task is being pursed along the following two complementary prongs: 1. Distributed memory version of CMS. We started with porting CMS to Linux. Since GNU C++ compiler that undelies the Linux environment is also available on all other UNIX boxes, such port would facilitate experiments with heterogeneous workstation clusters. Unfortunately, the current CMS code seems to be highly sensitive to numerous idiosyncracies of IRIX and SGI C++ compiler. GNU compiler, when tried on CMS, produces a long list of errors, some of which are quite difficult to track. We are proceeding with this task and we are interacting with Ft. Belvoir engieers who are also trying to port CMS to Linux. 2. JWORB/OWRTI based Metacomputing FMS Support. Here we started with a recent visit to CEWES by the end of June where we met with Jay Cliburn and Mitch Baker to discuss security and other system issues related to a sustainable multi-MSRC metacomputing environment. We concluded that the most practical approach will be to setup a kerberized JWORB servers in all centers, initially in the user mode (and hence to be manually restarted daily via secure id logins to individual labs) and later on in the system based 24x7 mode after WebHLA is approved by the Program Office as a viable Metacomputing platform for multi-MSRC job decomposition, scheduling and management. We also discussed job schedulers such as GRD, NQE, PBS or Miser used by various MSRCs and DCs and we concluded that a uniform meta-level scheduler packaged as CORBA service in JWORB would offer a natural solution to the current diversity of local scheduling strategies. We initiated a dialog with German company Genias that markets Codine/GRD and already developed some CORBA API that could be relevant for our purposes.