Toward real time simulation: prototyping of a large scale parallel ground target simulation

The current implementation of the Dynamic Ground Target Simulator (DGTS), used at the Rome Air Development Center, is too slow, too small in area covered, and lacks some functionality necessary for long-term needs. An analysis of the simulation was conducted to look at the performance characteristics of the existing simulation. A need for three or more orders of magnitude greater computational performance was projected. Technologies were surveyed, and a design plan was developed which is expected to achieve the desired performance utilizing coarse grain shared memory parallel processing. In the technique chosen, groups of events of the same or nearly the same time are executed together as a set of parallel tasks. The state space management mechanism ensures determinism and task independence by handling state data changes as updates while maintaining a read-only reference copy of the state. This technique is appropriate to this simulation due to the large proportion of time-step-like event processing, as for movement, and the requirements of modeling a perception-rich environment in which efficient read access to information about one object by another is important. >