Every few months, a continent crackles into life on linked
supercomputers. It is a place of huge cities and surrounding
countryside with an intricate road network on which tens and
even hundreds of thousands of trucks, tanks, mopeds,
pedestrians and other vehicles move.
The newly created world is an electronic arena in which top
military officers of the
U.S. Joint Forces Command can develop tactics for the future
- an arena that has taken a significant leap in complexity in
the past three years, facilitated by the computer skills
supplied by the University of Southern California Information
Sciences Institute.
Using techniques developed over decades of the use of high
performance supercomputers in academic research in the
physical sciences, the ISI-JFCOM team was able to make the
simulation software scalable, i.e. not
artificially limited to a small number of simulated
participants.
The ISI scientists collaborated with Caltech and
the technical personnel who were active in the JFCOM effort,
many of whom are employees of such companies as
Lockheed Martin, Alion Sciences, SAIC, and Toyon.
One experiment in this series, "Urban Resolve," began
October 12. Set in the year 2015, in JFCOM's description, "it
involves a U.S.-led
coalition force that must confront and overcome a skilled
adversary who is equipped with modern capabilities and is
operating in an urban environment."
Two groups of officers, the blue team leaders of the
coalition, and the red team leaders of the adversary, control
their forces from separate command posts, rooms full
of monitors at which specially trained aides enter make the
moves ordered by commanders.
These aides are called "puckers" - a holdover from the
days
when military exercises were conducted on huge tables or
floor areas, and soldiers pushed token ships or tanks,
("pucks") around with sticks.
Two other computer control rooms complete the set up. A
green team controls the "clutter"- vehicles,
pedestrians, and other facets of the civilian population, not
part of the forces of either side. Finally, a white room for the
experiment umpires synthesizes a combined view of
operation - a so-called "angel's eye view."
Puckers for green, red and blue teams add vehicles to
the world by selecting them from a menu of thousands pre-
written units of software code, each describing the behavior
of a specific vehicle - taxi, tank (not just generic, but
specific model), city bus, that have been created over the
course of more
than a decade.
Some of the vehicles have very complex behavior sets, but
even the simple 'bots "know" how fast to go
on which roads, to turn corners, to avoid collisions and to
stay on the roads, as well as being time-sensitive, e.g. they
know to crowd the roads during morning and afternoon rush
hours. A select few - most of them combat units - are
far
more complex, endowed with artificial intelligence that can
respond and react to changing circumstances in complex
ways.
Simple or complex, the population of the arena world used
to be much
smaller.
"For a long time," says ISI project director Dan Davis, a
marine veteran who has turned his combat-zone experience
to good use in the virtual world, "there was an unacceptable
ceiling for the number of the vehicles that could be simulated
on individual workstations on a local network - they couldn't
get much above about 30,000."
Dr. Robert Lucas, director of the computational sciences
division at ISI, led an effort that definitively broke this
barrier, with one major event coming in 2002. That event
was the record for SemiAutomated Forces so far: 1 million
entities. "Now," says Davis, "while we are hesitant to say just
exactly where the final limits may be, we see no immediate
constraints on the delivered scalability."
The three-part experiment now taking place will use about
100,000 entities, employing 128-node Linux cluster
supercomputers located at two military supercomputing
centers, ASC in Ohio and MHPCC in Maui. Both Linux clusters
were
provided to JFCOM by the Defense High Performance
Computing
Modernization Program (HPCMP). The Joint
Experimentation Directorate (J9) directs the exercise from
Suffolk, Virginia. Controllers
and analysts also work at the U.S. Army Topographic
Engineering Center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and at the Space
and Naval Warfare Systems Command facilities in San
Diego, California.
ISI computer scientists Dr. Ke-Thia Yao, Gene Wagenbreth,
Brian Barrett and John Tran also participated in the effort.
Tran, with degrees from Notre Dame University, joined the
team two years ago, and may have a good opportunity to
see some of the issues he has been simulating taking place
in real life, as he has just received orders to reserve duty
for six months. The JFCOM experiments are designed to
help the U.S. better understand how to engage in combat in
urban settings.
"Phase I will focus on using human intelligence," reads the
Urban Resolve description, "along with
advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
(ISR) technologies, to gain comprehensive situational
awareness and situational understanding of the urban
environment and the adversary forces."
"In ... Phase II, the friendly force will continue
to employ leading-edge ISR capabilities to find and track the
adversary. In Phase III the U.S.-led coalition will employ a
fully equipped, combined or joint task force with modern air,
land, sea, and space capabilities to maneuver effectively in
the urban battlespace."
The current experiments, which are scheduled to be
completed October 22, are part of a continuing program.
"The outcomes of this joint and multinational experiment will
expand our understanding of future urban conflict, from pre-
crisis to post-conflict, while providing insights into today's
urban warfighting challenges. Without the use of high
performance computers, these experiments would not have
been conducted at the scale necessary to reflect the realities
of 21st century urban environments," the JFCom
description concludes.
Pucker-eye view: a segment of the urban
battlefield, with (left hand side) control toolbar. Note the
green arrow at 10 o'clock inside the yellow circle, just above
the roadway on the far side of the canal.
(Click on image
to enlarge)
The view from the green arrow viewpoint, The
vehicles seen as dots on the display above resolve into
individual cars, motorcycles and pedestrians.
(Click on image
to enlarge) |
