Scalable means more than more: a unifying definition of simulation scalability

In recent years, the military simulations community has placed an increasing emphasis on scalability and scalable simulation systems. The word “scalability” is used in a variety of ways by different simulation communities. The paper describes some of the more common usages and presents a general, unifying definition of simulation scalability which addresses the intent of these differing usages. Many common definitions of scalability can be viewed as simple restrictions of this multivariate scalability function to some subset of the variables in its domain. The quantitative nature of this definition allows systems to be compared based on their scalability instead of their relative performance at some level of capability. The utility of the proposed general and restricted definitions of scalability is discussed