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Linux And Innovative Simulations
cameronhunt writes "This article (shameless plug alert - I'm quoted in it) presents a growing trend of integrating simulated and live training in the military - often using Linux and Open Source methods, standards, and protocols. This trend isn't just in the military, but increasingly found everywhere from games to everyday life. I'll be talking more about this at LinuxWorld."
I'm sorry, but there are two entirely distinct topics in this article:
1) Wargames
2) Linux
Part of the article talks in depth about the wargames, the way they're going about it, what they hope to accomplish, etc.
However, other parts of the article talk about Linux controlling these wargames, as though that was the crux of the article. Now it's not impossible (or bad) to write an article that ties these two subjects together, but this comes across as either (a) two articles smooshed into one, or (b) An article about wargames written by a Linux evangelist.
Just a thought. Not everything that involves Linux is about Linux.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
We're working on using video see-through head mounted displays to overlay real time CG, something we call "mixed reality". It's like traditional VR, but we add a view of the real world, special effects like smoke, compressed air and interactive lighting, spatialized surround sound, etc. Take traditional VR and add in a whole bunch of technologies and techniques from theme parks and you get what we do.
One of our current research projects is for the Army to simulate urban combat training. We were also showing an entertainment version of the system on Display at SIGGRAPH in San Diego this past week.
The graphics engine for our system runs on Linux, using OpenGL and GLUT, written in C++. Control systems for special effects and point source sound are written in Java, which run on Linux, OSX, and WinXP (whatever platform supports harware interface drivers). We couldn't do what we do without OSS, and hope to release some components to the open source community once they get a little more mature.
See Our Website for more info.
...if the military is going to use open source for all of this from now on does that mean we can get our $1.1 trillion back?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Now it makes sense. Bush did so well with Afghanistan, he got a free game. Then he chose Iraq. He naturally assumed he'd get a free game again, and planned on using it either on Syria or Korea, but he didn't count on this level being harder, what with the guerilla warfare tactics and all that.
Perhaps he should have picked up the nitro boost when he broke into Baghdad? I recommend that the troops start banging on all the walls until we find the "secret areas" with caches of armor, med kits, and rail guns.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Here is an article about an Australian system which simulates several aspects of land warfare. It's realistic and accurate enough that the Australian Army uses the rifle range simulation to qualify its soldiers on marksmanship. I believe that it is based on a popular Linux distro.
4 comments in one:
1. Why Linux?
True, the eetimes article is discombobulated and provides little explanation of why Linux should matter at all for wargaming simulations. And the explanation it implies (that Linux helps data compatibility) is nonsensical.
However, I've seen several military simulation projects that run on Linux. The obvious reasons: The Pentagon isn't a fast or flexible software developer. These games may take decades of to produce and shape into something workable, and we can't throw them out just because new OSes (Windows XP, etc) come along.
So many projects that were first written for big iron SGI or Solaris machines are now running on Linux desktops. I've heard several ancedotes of software getting a 5x speed boost alongside a 10x drop in platform cost when changing hardware vendors from SGI to Dell.
One major simulation project is OneSAF ("One Semi-Automated Force"). You can go read the PowerPoint they gave at a Linux conference years ago. (The "CCTT" project mentioned in the article is an ancient fork of OneSAF)
2. 100 entities is small
The article says they will be reaching the point of simulating 100 entities in their exercise, up from 20 in the previous test. And it'll take place at 3 different locations.
That is tiny compared to the number already used in a military simulation last year. Millenium Challenge 2002 took place on ~15 sites around the US, and involved 13500 human participants, many of them controlling more than one "entity" in the game.
3. The Pentagon is trending back towards DIS
The article mentions this project is using the IEEE 1278 standard DIS (Distributed Interactive Simulation). That is a fairly old specification- finalized at least 10 years ago. It worked well back then, and still does. However, it fell out of popular use in the late 90s because a vantity project from Defense Modeling & Simulation Office mandated that all simulations be switched to use their new improved HLA infrastructure, which is IEEE 1516.
The HLA was a traditional example of Fred Brook's Second-System effect. That is, when a person first makes a project of a certain type, he will be conservative and careful to make something that works and he can understand. (In this case, the DIS protocol). But once the first system works well, programmers tend to get overconfident and decide to fill the second system will all manner of elaborate stuff that distracts from the real purpose. That is what happened with the HLA protocol.
HLA is a real kitchen-sink system, addressing all uses but satsifying none. Only in the past year has DMSO's political power been reduced so that wargame developers can stop using the bad, unpredictable HLA and get back to the clean, efficient, and comprehensible DIS.
4. HLA does have one advantage over DIS
The DIS protocol is a global publication system. Each computer controlling simulated entities broadcasts their position to ever other computer. (Originally this used ethernet broadcast, now it might change to internet multicast UDP). That meant that in a large exercise, people out-of-range from each other would still recieve positional updates clogging their network card. HLA included specifications to describe, geographically, who should recieve which packets. This allowed for world-spanning scenarios to be played with thousands of vehicles spread around.
The article suggests that new projects (DFIRST? I haven't heard of that before) will bring some of this capability to DIS.
All the military simulation articles I have seen talk about the soldier game-type simulations. This is not the only simulations the military uses though. For instance here is a list of military tools used for planning and modeling. This goes form supply-chains to medical planning. I understand it's not as fun to think about groups of people filling in supply and demand info for ammo compared with troops walking through a mission on their computers; however, I'd think the first would be in the grand scheme of things more important.