Middleware for Interactive Training for Supercomputers

High Performance Computers (HPC) have not yet been applied well to Interactive Simulations for Training (IST). Our goals are to both provide services by which ISTs can be created and deployed effectively on HPCs, and to demonstrate the power of HPC for IST. Our fundamental approach is to create middleware that communicates training-relevant facts to the simulation executing on a HPC. Our Phase II work will elaborate upon our Phase I prototype, which showed the middleware’s potential to dynamically control the complexity of the warfighters’ training environment. In Phase II we will develop the middleware to collect and disseminate information for efficiently exploiting the resources of the HPC for trainees’ needs. This information includes (a) the current estimate of the trainees’ cognitive resources and (b) the current state of processing of each node, which, if the underlying simulation allows, enables efficient load balancing. While our middleware will support the general case, we will also construct a specific example to demonstrate the power of HPC using our middleware to manage a training simulation built using the Delta3D game engine. Specifically, we will modify the Marines’ Deployable Virtual Training Environment to use HPC resources to model individuals in crowds.