PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov
Contact: John G. Watson
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 4, 1997
RESEARCHERS STAGE LARGEST MILITARY SIMULATION EVER
On November 20, SC '97: High Performance Networking and
Computing, an annual conference on supercomputing co-sponsored by
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the
Association for Computing Machinery, was both the origination and
exhibition site of the largest military simulation in history.
The simulation, directed from and instantaneously viewed on
the conference floor of the San Jose Convention Center, dwarfed
what has been possible in the past in terms of the number of
vehicles simulated--66,239 tanks, trucks and other vehicles--and
the complexity of their modeled behavior.
Organized by a team comprised of engineers from NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology,
both located in Pasadena, CA, as well as the Space & Naval
Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, CA, the simulation played
out a scenario of opposing forces operating on terrain modeled on
the geography of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The vehicles executed a
fast-moving scenario: Blue Forces aggressively attacked and
ultimately overran Red Forces. Real-time execution took place for
nearly two hours.
Actual execution of the simulation was remotely performed on
supercomputers within the Department of Defense's High
Performance Computer Modernization Program (HPCMP), whose
conference booth controlled the execution and displayed the
results from supercomputers located at the Aeronautical Systems
Center (ASC) in Dayton, Ohio, and the Corps of Engineers
Waterways Experiment Station (CEWES) in Vicksburg, MS.
The largest prior simulation, utilizing national networks of
workstations, encompassed 5,000 vehicles. The potential for the
November 20th simulation began when the Information Technology
Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency initiated
the Synthetic Forces Express Project, or S F Express, in early
1996. This project's successful goal was the creation of a
scalable architecture on massively parallel supercomputers. The
new architecture, built under S F Express' auspices by the same
team that coordinated the November 20th simulation, enabled this
latest simulation to surpass its predecessor in scale by well
over ten times.
The simulation engine was Modular Semi-Automated Forces, a
large software system that has successfully generated synthetic
environments for many large military training exercises. Using
the expanded capabilities made possible by the new S F Express
architecture, the computers (a 256-processor IBM SP2 and two 64-
processor SGI Origin 2000s at the Aeronautical Systems Center and
a 256-processor SP2 at Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment
Station) were connected over the Defense Research and Engineering
Network.
The individual processors involved computed the complex
vehicle behaviors in real time, sharing the results internally
and across the Defense Research and Engineering Network to
achieve the coordinated result.
Dr. David Curkendall, head of JPL's Advanced Laboratory for
Parallel High-Performance Applications, the JPL unit that worked
on the new architecture, explains, "Access to a large number of
processors, such as these provided through the Department of
Defense's High Performance Computer Modernization Program, makes
such large simulations not just a possibility, but a practical,
cost-effective reality as well. The support staffs at both ASC
and CEWES worked closely and diligently with the S F Express team
to enable this successful demonstration."
The computer simulation was supported in part by the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of
Technology, Pasadena, CA.
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12/4/97 JGW
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