PUBLICATIONS -- FMS 1. Geoffrey C. Fox, Wojtek Furmanski, Ganesh Krishnamurthy, Hasan T. Ozdemir, Zeynep Odcikin- Ozdemir, Tom A. Pulikal, Krishnan Rangarajan and Ankur Sood, Using WebHLA to Integrate HPC FMS Modules with Web/Commodity based Distributed Object Technologies of CORBA, Java, COM and XML, in Proceedings of the Advanced Simulation Technologies Conference (ASTC99), San Diego, CA, Apr 11-15, 1999. HLA standards for interoperability between various DoD Modeling and Simulation paradigms are being enforced in parallel with the rapid onset of new Object Web / Commodity standards for distributed objects and componentware, emergent at the crossroads of CORBA, COM, Java, and XML technologies. WebHLA explores synergies between and integrates both trends by offering Object Web based implementation of the HLA framework. Our goal is to deliver a uniform platform that facilitates conversion of legacy codes to and development of new codes in compliance with HLA, HPC and Object Web standards. We outline here the overall design of WebHLA, we summarize the system components prototyped so far and we illustrate our approach for one HPC FMS application – Parallel CMS (Comprehensive Mine Simulator) - in the area of large scale minefield simulation and countermine engineering. 2. G. C. Fox, W. Furmanski, S. Nair, H. T. Ozdemir, Z. Odcikin Ozdemir and T. A. Pulikal, WebHLA - An Interactive Multiplayer Environment for High Performance Distributed Modeling and Simulation, In Proceedings of the International Comference on Web-based Modeling and Simulation, WebSim99, San Francisco, CA January 17-20 1999. The process of integrating DoD Modeling and Simulation paradigms around the new HLA/RTI standards proceeds in parallel with the onset of new Object Web standards for distributed objects and componentware, emergent at the crossroads of CORBA, DCOM, Java, and XML based distributed object technologies. We describe here our WebHLA approach which integrates both trends by offering Object Web based implementation of the HLA framework. WebHLA follows a three-tier architecture including: a) Web / Commodity based interactive simulation authoring and runtime front-ends given by Java applets or DirectX multiplayers; b) software bus in the middleware, given by Object Web RTI i.e. our implementation of DMSO RTI 1.3 as a Java CORBA service managed by JWORB (Java Object Web Request Broker); c) domain specific backend simulation modules, including advanced high performance DoD simulation kernels such as ModSAF or SPEEDES. We describe here the overall design of WebHLA, we report on components prototyped so far and we summarize the status of the ongoing development of WebHLA applications. 3. D. Bernholdt, P. Chappell, G. C. Fox, W. Furmanski, D. Kasthuril, G. Krishnamurthy, S. Nair, H. T. Ozdemir, Z. Odcikin Ozdemir, K. Rangarajan and K. Snively, Parallel and Metacomputing Support for CMS - Comprehensive Minefield Simulation, Demonstration Handout, Supercomputing 98, Orlando, FL, November 7-13, 1998. CMS is an advanced DIS system under development by the Night Vision Lab at Ft. Belvoir, VA. CMS simulates a broad spectrum of mines and minefields to interact with vehicles and countermine systems, such as those provided by ModSAF, on the virtual battlefield. Modern warfare can require millions of mines to be present on the battlefield, such as in the Korean Demilitarized Zone or the Gulf War. The simulation of such battlefield arenas requires High Performance Computing support. Syracuse University is building Parallel and Metacomputing Support for CMS by porting the CMS module to Origin2000 and linking it with a collection of distributed simulators handling terrain, vehicles and visualization. The current demo illustrates initial capabilities of the system and includes: a) Parallel CMS running on Origin2000 at ARL or CEWES MSRCs; b) a set of ModSAF vehicles running at Syracuse workstations; and c) visualization front-ends including Mak Stealth and our PC/Direct3D based CMS viewer. Work is under way to provide HLA based federation support for large scale Metacomputing CMS with millions of simulation objects. 4. G. C. Fox, W. Furmanski, H. T. Ozdemir and S. Pallickara, New Systems Technologies and Software Products for HPCC: Volume II - High Performance Commodity Computing on the Pragmatic Object Web, Management White Paper for RCI, Ltd., submitted October 14, 1998. In this paper, we describe an approach to high performance computing which makes extensive use of commodity technologies. In particular, we exploit new Web technolgies such as XML, CORBA and COM based distributed objects and Java. The use of commodity hardware (workstation and PC based MPP's) and operating systems (UNIX, Linux and Windows NT) is relatively well established. We propose extending this strategy to the programming and runtime environments supporting developers and users of both parallel computers and large scale distributed systems. We suggest that this will allow one to build systems that combine the functionality and attractive user environments of modern enterprise systems with delivery of high performance in those application components that need it. Critical to our strategy is the observation that HPCC applications are very complex but typically only require high performance in parts of the problem. These parts are dominant when measured in terms of compute cycles or data-points but often a modest part of the problem if measured in terms of lines of code or other measures of implementation effort. Thus rather than building such systems heroically from scratch, we suggest starting with a modest performance but user friendly system and then selectively enhancing performance when needed. In particular, we view the emergent generation of distributed object and component technologies as crucial for encapsulating performance critical software in the form of reusable plug-and play modules. We review here commodity approaches to distributed objects by four major stakeholders: Java by Sun Microsystems, CORBA by Object Management Group, COM by Microsoft and XML by the World- Wide Web Consortium. Next, we formulate our suggested integration framework called Pragmatic Object Web in which we try to mix-and-match the best of Java, CORBA, COM and XML and to build a practical commodity based middleware and front-ends for today’s high performance computing backends. Finally, we illustrate our approach on a few selected application domains such as WebHLA for Modeling and Simulation and Java Grande for Scientific and Engineering Computing. 5. G. C. Fox, W. Furmanski, S. Nair, H. T. Ozdemir, Z. Odcikin Ozdemir and T. A. Pulikal, WebHLA - An Interactive Programming and Training Environment for High Performance Modeling and Simulation, In Proceedings of the SISO Simulation Interoperability Workshop, SIW Fall 98, paper SIW-98F-216, Orlando, FL, Sept 14-18, 1998 The process of integrating DoD Modeling and Simulation paradigms around new HLA/RTI standards proceeds in parallel with the onset of new commodity standards for distributed objects and componentware, sometimes referred to as Object Web and emergent at the crossroads of CORBA, COM, Java, and W3C WOM models. In this paper, we describe our WebHLA approach that integrates both trends by offering an open implementation of the HLA framework in terms of the Object Web standards. More specifically, we are addressing WebHLA design and prototype development at NPAC in a set of FMS PET tasks within the DoD HPC Modernization Program at ARL and CEWES, including: a) Java CORBA based implementation of DMSO RTI 1.3; b) Visual Authoring of HLA simulations; c) Parallel ports (to Origin2000) of selected computationally intensive M&S modules; d) Web linked database and data mining backends; e) real-time multiplayer gaming front-ends. We summarize here the status of the corresponding WebHLA components and we illustrate their integration in some emergent WebHLA application domains such as: Distance Training, Metacomputing FMS, Cluster Management, Simulation Based Acquisition. 6. G. C. Fox, W. Furmanski, B. Goveas, B. Natarajan and S. Shanbhag, WebFlow based Visual Authoring Tools for HLA Applications, in Proceedings of the International Test and Evaluation (ITEA) Workshop on High Performance Computing, Aberdeen, MD, July 13-16, 1998, submitted June 10, 1998. We describe here a pilot project towards a Web/Commodty software based visual authoring environment for HLA simulations. The DMSO FEDEP process, based on standardized data interchange formats (DIFs) matches in a natural way the visual dataflow paradigm of the WebFlow system at NPAC. However, the existing HLA object editors such as OMDT by Aegis Corporation are not yet ready to act as reusable autonomous components in larger toolkits. We re-engineered the OMDT tool using Microsoft Excel as the software base and the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) scripting technology, and we integrated the resulting COM component called Object Model Builder with WebFlow. As a proof-of-the-concept demo, we constructed a simple visual authoring toolkit that facilitates editing and computational steering of the Jager video game, distributed by DMSO as part of the HLA/RTI release. 7. G. C. Fox, W. Furmanski, S. Nair and Z. Odcikin Ozdemir, Microsoft DirectPlay meets DMSO RTI for Virtual Prototyping in HPC T&E Environments, in Proceedings of the International Test and Evaluation (ITEA) Workshop on High Performance Computing, Aberdeen, MD, July 13-16, 1998, submitted June 10, 1998. In our Pragmatic Object Web approach to distributed object technologies, we integrate complementary aspects of CORBA, Java, COM and WOM. Here, we focus on Microsoft COM and we analyze synergies between DirectX / DirectPlay multi-player multimedia gaming technologies and the DoD Modeling and Simulation technologies such as HLA/RTI. We discuss the integration of both layers via the COM/CORBA bridge using our JWORB (Java Web Object Broker) middleware and we outline an early draft of a Web/Commodity based High Performance Virtual Prototyping Environment for Testing, Evaluation and Simulation Based Acquisition that will integrate commodity software (DirectX) and hardware (NT clusters) with the legacy simulation backends. 8. G. C. Fox, W. Furmanski and H. T. Ozdemir, Object Web (Java / CORBA) based RTI to support Metacomputing M&S, in Proceedings of the International Test and Evaluation (ITEA) Workshop on High Performance Computing, Aberdeen, MD, July 13-16, 1998, submitted June 10, 1998. We present here our Pragmatic Object Web based approach to High Performance Modeling and Simulation and we describe the associated middleware software recently prototyped at NPAC: JWORB (Java Web Object Request Broker) which integrates HTTP and IIOP protocols, and Object Web RTI which implements DMSO RTI 1.3 on top of the JWORB based CORBA / Java software bus. We explain how JWORB and OW RTI are used to build WebHLA – an interactive FMS training environment and we outline our plan towards WebHLA based Virtual Prototyping Environments for Testing, Evaluation and Simulation Based Acquisition. 9. G. C. Fox, W. Furmanski and T. A. Pulikal, Evaluating New Transparent Persistency Commodity Models: JDBC, CORBA PSS, OLEDB and W3C WOM for HPC T&E Databases, in Proceedings of the International Test and Evaluation (ITEA) Workshop on High Performance Computing, Aberdeen, MD, July 13-16, 1998, submitted June 10, 1998. We analyze here the standard candidates for the universal (storage medium- and vendor- indepdendent) persistency frameworks as proposed by the leading alternative technologies for distributed objects: Java, CORBA, COM and WOM. We point out that the consensus in this field is yet to be reached and we present our Pragmatic Object Web approach to coordinate and integrate complementary technologies. We illustrate it on a few practical examples of Web linked collaboratory database environments we constructed recently for various communities and application domains such as telemedicine, distance education, interactive FMS training, data mining of T&E data from the Virtual Proving Ground. Finally, we summarize lessons learned and we outline our recommendations for the HPC T&E database approach. 10. G. C. Fox, W. Furmanski and H. T. Ozdemir, 1998, Java/CORBA based Real-Time Infrastructure to Integrate Event-Driven Simulations, Collaboration and Distributed Object / Componentware Computing, In Proceedings of PDPTA’98 (Las Vegas, NV, July 98. We are discussing the four major standard candidates for distributed object/componentware computing: Java, CORBA, COM and WOM within our proposed coordination framework we call Pragmatic Object Web (POW). We describe our integration approach based on multi-protocol middleware server JWORB (Java Web Object Request Broker) that currently integrates HTTP and IIOP and which we now further develop to also support COM and WOM core functionalities. We are also experimenting with visual dataflow authoring front-ends using NPAC WebFlow system on top of JWORB based software bus. Finally, we illustrate our technologies in one major application domain - DoD Modeling and Simulation - where we use JWORB to implement the Real-Time Infrastructure (RTI) layer of High Level Architecture (HLA). HLA was recently specified by DMSO as a general integration framework for DoD distributed simulations and we claim that we can bring it to a broader community of distributed collaborative object/componentware computing via the interactive Web/CORBA/Java/COM interfaces of our Pragmatic Object Web. 11. D. Bernholdt, G. C. Fox, W. Furmanski, B. Natarajan, H. T. Ozdemir, Z. Odcikin Ozdemir and T. A. Pulikal, WebHLA - An Interactive Programming and Training Environment for High Peerformance Modeling and Simulation, in Proceedings of the DoD HPC 98 Users Group Conference, Rice University, Houston TX, June 1-5, 1998 Our technology roadmap for High Performance Modeling and Simulation, outlined in NPAC PET FMS White Paper [1] is based on several ongoing and rapid technology evolution processes such as: a) transition of the DoD M&S standards from DIS to HLA; b) extension of Web technologies from passive information dissemination to interactive distributed computing based on enterprise standards offered by CORBA, Java and DCOM; c) transition of HPCC systems from custom (such as dedicated MPPs) to commodity base (such as NT clusters).