Using techniques developed over decades of academic research in the use of high
performance supercomputers, the ISI-JFCOM team was able to make the simulation
software run in a way that was 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," is set in the year 2015. JFCOM's
says "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.
The aides are called "puckers" — a holdover from the days when military exercises
were conducted on huge tables or floor areas, and soldiers pushed model 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 of 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 robots
“know” how fast to go on which roads, how to turn corners, how to avoid collisions
andhow to stay on the road. They are also time-sensitive. They can 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 allows them tof 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 a major event in 2002. That
event was the record for SemiAutomated Forces so far: one 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."
Thecurrent three-part experiment uses about 100,000 entities, employing cluster
supercomputers located at two military supercomputing centers, one in Ohio and
another in Maui. The experiments are directed from the Joint Experimentation Directorate
in Suffolk, Va., with two other sites where controllers and analysts work: 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.
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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.
|
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| The view from the green arrow viewpoint, The vehicles and shapes seen as dots and outlines on the display above resolve into buildings, trees and individual cars, motorcycles and pedestrians. |
"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 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.
