Tutorial: Distributed Simulation on the Grid

 

Stephen John Turner

 

Professor of Computer Science

Director, Parallel & Distributed Computing Centre

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798

 

Abstract

The development of many complex simulation applications requires collaborative effort from researchers with different domain knowledge and expertise, possibly at different locations. These simulation systems often require huge computing resources and data sets which may be geographically distributed. In order to support collaborative model development and to cater for the increasing complexity of such systems, it is necessary to harness distributed resources over the Internet. The emergence of Grid technologies provides exciting new opportunities for large scale distributed simulation, enabling collaboration and the use of distributed computing resources, while also facilitating access to geographically distributed data sets. Part 1 of this tutorial describes the concepts and research challenges of large scale distributed simulation on the Grid.Part 2 presents a Service Oriented HLA RTI (High Level Architecture Runtime Infrastructure) developed at Nanyang Technological University.This is an open-source middleware that can be used for executing HLA-based distributed simulations in a Grid environment.

 

Part 1: Concepts and Challenges

 

1. Background and Motivation: Introduction to Distributed Simulation; Introduction to Web and Grid Services; Motivation for Distributed Simulation on the Grid.

2. Taxonomy of Grid-based Simulation: Grid-Facilitated Approach; Grid-Enabled Approach; Grid-Oriented Approach; Non-HLA Approaches.

 

3. Research Challenges: Collaborative Model Development; Model Discovery and Matching; Resource and Simulation Management.

 

4. Decoupled Architecture: Advantages of a Decoupled Architecture; Migration and Load Balancing; Fault Tolerance.

 

Part 2: A Service Oriented HLA RTI (SOHR)

 

5. SOHR Framework: Overview of HLA Services; Introduction to Globus Toolkit and WSRF (Web Services Resource Framework); Architecture of SOHR; Services and Modules; Experimental Results.

 

6. Using SOHR: Developing Clients; Using SOHR as a Service; Deploying SOHR; Extending SOHR.

 

7. Demonstration of SOHR: Demonstration of Distributed Simulation on the Grid using SOHR.

 

8. Conclusions: Further information; Future Work.

 

 

Biography

 

Stephen John Turner is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Parallel and Distributed Computing Centre at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He received his MA in Mathematics and Computer Science from Cambridge University (UK) and his MSc and PhD in Computer Science from Manchester University (UK). His current research interests include: Parallel and Distributed Simulation, Grid Computing, High Performance Computing and Multi-Agent Systems. He is steering committee chair of the Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS) conference and advisory committee member of the Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT) symposium. He is also an area editor for ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS). He has published extensively on distributed simulation and has received a number of best paper awards at international conferences for his research in this area.