An Analysis of Increased Vertical Scaling in Three-Dimensional Virtual World Simulation

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the analysis of the effect of vertical computational scaling on the performance of a simulation based training prototype currently under development by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. The United States military is interested in facilitating Warfighter training by investigating large-scale realistic virtual operational environments. In order to support expanded training at higher echelons, virtual world simulators need to scale to support more simultaneous client connections, more intelligent agents, and more physics interactions. This work provides an in-depth analysis of a virtual world simulator under different hardware profiles to determine the effect of increased vertical computational scaling.

Analyzing Virtual World Region Fidelity on Scalability and Simulation Performance

“…Scalability efforts have included experimentation involving various independent variables that have been hypothesized to affect virtual world simulator performance. Specifically, the MOSES team has previously assessed simulator performance by analyzing the effect that the number of CPU cores [12], legacy versus prototype hardware configurations [13], network bandwidth [14], and processing memory usage [15] have on virtual world simulator performance. With the information collected, the MOSES research project plans to create a lightweight predictive model that will enable virtual world training scenario designers to calculate, a priori, the number of trainees that may synchronously operate in the virtual world.…”

“…Because OpenSim is a CPU-intensive virtual world, the team initially investigated CPU-based vertical scaling on the simulator. First, research was performed that compared simulator performance between a legacy 2010 and modern 2015 server [13]. In the work, experiments compared how the different CPU technologies performed with an increased number of concurrent users in the simulation.…”