Implementing Distributed Synthetic Forces Simulations In Metacomputing Environments

A distributed, parallel implementation of the widely used Modular Semi-Automated Forces (ModSAF) Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) is presented, with Scalable Parallel Processors (SPPs) used to simulate more than 50,000 individual vehicles. The single-SPP code is portable and has been used on a variety of different SPP architectures for simulations with up to 15,000 vehicles. A general metacomputing framework for DIS on multiple SPPs is discussed and results are presented for an initial system using explicit Gateway processes to manage communications among the SPPs. These 50K-vehicle simulations utilized 1,904 processors at six sites across seven time zones, including platforms from three manufacturers. Ongoing activities to both simplify and enhance the metacomputing system using Globus are described.