At the Intelligent Servosystems Laboratory work has been proceeding for some time on the development of a distributed processing environment to allow for the implementation of complex dynamics simulations. Initially, these simulations were written on a Silicon Graphics IRIS 3130 workstation with integrated numerical and graphics display code. While this approach is satisfactory for computationally non-intensive applications, it became evident that more computing power would become necessary in order to achieve simulation in real time. The logical step was to use more powerful computers for the number crunching, and to retain the IRIS workstation, which is optimized for various graphics tasks, such as rotating, filling, clipping, etc. for display purposes. This necessitated the development of code to allow for interprocess communication among various machines. Our computing environment consists of Sun and IRIS workstations, connected via an Ethernet.
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