MasPaWS-a Massively Parallel War Simulator

Describes the design, implementation and performance of a battlefield simulator for massively parallel SIMD machines. MasPaWS (Massively Parallel War Simulator) is a first-generation prototype that simulates the battle dynamics of a 2D theater to the level of individual tanks in a battlefield having certain terrain features. Objects in the battlefield are the terrain features and tanks. The battle cycles through a set of protocols: perception and combat, update combat, migration, and update migration. MasPaWS, written in the MasPar Programming Language (MPL), has been implemented on a MasPar machine. The salient features of MasPaWS include: (1) use of simple protocols to match the machine architecture, (2) parametrization of several quantities to control the computation of and communication between MasPar processors and to estimate performance, and (3) interactive user input for terrain specification and generation, and other key parameters. Our work appears to be the first of its kind in war simulation on a massively parallel SIMD machine, using thousands of processors. Our results indicate that MasPaWS is both data- and architecture-scalable for battlefield simulation, while achieving high efficiency at the same time.