From: Dana Paterson Subject: Re: TECH: Parallelism and VR Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 20:19:22 -0500 Message-ID: <33138F9A.73BD@eagle1.eaglenet.com> Organization: PERSONAL ACCOUNT Marc Bernatchez wrote: > You would do me a big favor if you could tell me what are the > current standard parallel protocols in use in today's VR systems. I > have heard of PVM (parallel virtual machines). From what I've been > told, it's pretty inadequate to real time VR applications due to its > poor speed performances. > Marc, There are two "Standards" for DoD users which apply here. The one that is the most mature and probably has the most immediate applicability is IEEE 1278.1 "Application Protocols for Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS)". This provides lots of support for Being, Moving, Shooting, & Dying. It also provides for Communications between Entities. It exploits broadcast UDP Packets as its underlying communications medium. The other "Standard" is known as "The High Level Architecture (HLA) for Defense Simulations". It is not (yet) an IEEE Standard but will begin that process next week in Orlando, Florida. HLA is very new having achieved its first baseline last August. Experimental work was done last year and this year hopes to see its first "real" use. So, HLA is probably not what you're after if you need something to use in the next few months. An interesting final note. There are a bunch of DoD Realtime VR simulations that are currently DIS compliant. In the future, all DoD simulations (with some exceptions) will be built to or become compliant with the HLA. So, there will be some impact to DIS applications and work is already underway to reconcile DIS with the HLA. Stay tuned. For HLA Info http://www.dmso.mil/ For DIS Info http://siso.sc.ist.ucf.edu/ Dana Paterson Computer Scientist