A Modular Approach for Parallel Simulation of Virtual Testbed Applications

摘要

Virtual Testbeds are advanced 3D simulation environments that model all relevant aspects of complex technical systems, to enable their systematic evaluation by engineers from various disciplines. Due to the high complexity of the resulting simulation, real-time capabilities are very hard to achieve without applying multi-threading strategies. Therefore, we present a novel, simulation architecture that facilitates a modular approach to perform parallel simulations of arbitrary environments without further effort. Specifically, no explicit knowledge of the underlying simulation algorithms or model partitioning is needed. As a result, engineers can simply distribute simulation components such as rigid-body dynamics, kinematics, renderer, controllers etc. among different threads without being concerned about the specific technical realization. We achieve this by managing (partial) copies of the state data underlying the simulation models. Each copy acts as a self-contained, independent entity and is bound to one thread.