Large Scale Simulation: Current Approaches and Future Challenges

There has been a lot of interest recently in Large Scale Simulation. While some parts of the industry are still struggling to simulate hundreds of objects, others are pushing forward to multiple millions of simulated objects. To push past the barrier into the million-entity range, much talk has focused on the middleware that could be used to “solve this problem.” Millions of dollars have been spent focused on improving middleware as a sort of panacea. This talk will discuss the role middleware plays in limiting entity count, but also how the bigger problem is at the simulation level itself. If we want to solve the problem of large-scale simulation, we need to do more than focus on network protocols. I will first look at how approaches like Data Oriented Design have helped with entity count. More importantly, I will focus on the larger challenges that loom and try to offer some possible paths for governments and industry to follow to truly achieve large scale simulation.