Title
MasPaWS — a Massively Parallel War Simulator
Abstract
We describe the design, implementation and performance of a battlefield simulator for massively parallel SIMD machines. MasPaWS (Massively Parallel War Simulator) is a first generation prototype that simulates the battle dynamics of a two-dimensional theater to the level of individual tanks in a battlefield having certain terrain features. Objects in the battlefield are the terrain features and tanks. The battle cycles through a set of protocols: perception and combat, update combat, migration and update migration. MasPaWS, written in Maspar Programming Language (MPL), has been implemented on MasPar machine. The salient features of MasPaWS include: 1.(1) use of simple protocols to match machine architecture,2.(2) parametrization of several quantities to control the computation of and communication between MasPar processors and to estimate performance, and3.(3) interactive user input for terrain specification and generation and other key parameters. Our work appears to be the first of its kind in war simulation on a massively parallel SIMD machine, using thousands of processors. Our results indicate that MasPaWS is both data and architecture scalable for battlefield simulation, while achieving high efficiency at the same time.
Year
DOI
Venue
1996
10.1016/0928-4869(95)00030-5
Simulation Practice and Theory
Keywords
Field
DocType
Parallel simulation,Performance study,Battlefield management,SIMD machines,Scalability
Architecture,Computer science,Massively parallel,Simulation,Terrain,Parallel computing,SIMD,Theoretical computer science,Battle,Computation,Scalability,Salient
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
4
4
0928-4869
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.37
4
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chandra N. Sekharan110512.77
Ma Zhi-hai210.37
Udaya B. Vemulapati321.64
William J. Porthouse410.37
Allen Irwin510.37