Distributed Simulation and Virtual Worlds

Contact:
Dr Georgios Theodoropoulos
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TT, United Kingdom

Email: informatics-crn-enquiries[at]cs.bham.ac.uk
Website: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/disys

The application of discrete event simulation to ever more complex problems (such as health care systems, biological systems, training, military systems, environment systems, flexible manufacturing systems, automobile traffic modelling, aerodynamic simulation, telecommunication networks, computer systems etc.) has long placed it in the highly computation intensive world with computational requirements which far exceed the capabilities of conventional sequential von Neumann computer systems. The execution of these simulations on to parallel distributed platforms has emerged as the only viable solution. The last decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in distributed simulation not only as a technology for speeding up simulations but also for connecting together geographically distributed simulators to construct large scale Distributed Virtual Worlds.

Research in this area in Birmingham is undertaken by the Distributed Systems Lab at the School of Computer Science. Examples of current research projects include the distributed simulation of agent-based complex systems (funded by EPRSC in collaboration with the University of Nottingham), the distributed simulation of asynchronous hardware (funded by EPSRC, in collaboration with Steve Furber’s AMULET group at the University of Manchester) and the development of adaptive bandwidth reduction techniques for Distributed Virtual Environments (such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games). Another exciting project is DS-GRID (Large Scale Distributed Simulation on the Grid) one of only four international projects funded by the e-Science Programme, in collaboration with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.