List of projects suitable for advanced undergraduate, Masters, or first-year Ph.D. students

This page describes several projects that might help beginning students who are interested in PARADISE to get their feet wet and get involved.

Real-time Distributed Agreement Protocols

For instance, in PARADISE, agreement must occur for: distributed collision detection and resolution (agreeing on the fact that two entities have collided and deciding what to do about it), resource transfer (guaranteeing that when I hand you an object, there is exactly one copy after the transfer), and dead entity detection--deciding that an entity is dead or unavailable.

There are many simple transactional agreement protocols floating around in the distributed systems community, but PARADISE has some unique characteristics, particularly its strict requirements for real-time agreement.

This project would involve research into real-time agreement protocols for distributed simulations, and hopefully implementing them into the prototype PARADISE sytem that we are building. A good place to start with this project would probably involve looking at distributed collision detection.

PARADISE Development

We are building a distributed simulation testbed for our research, and there are several pieces of it that are ripe for implementation.

• Controlling Simulated Entities: software to create realistic actions of entities in the simulated world. Code to simulate enemy-controlled tanks, planes, and missiles would be welcome, for instance. This would be a good, easy way to get your feet wet in the project.

• Entities supporting multiple levels of detail: create an entity that can be rendered witht multiple levels-of-detail. The entity will need to dynamically change its representation based upon its relative size on the display and other application requirements. The project will possibly involve integration with the "multiple-fidelity channel" architecture for dead reckoning.

• Player-controlled vehicles: software to create a vehicle that could be controlled by a player. How about writing code to simulate the action of a tank or an airplane, for instance. This project would require some interaction with collision detection and with terrain.

• Virtual Environment: software to simulate clouds, smoke, wind, rain. Requires that it "look right" visually, as well as "act right" -- a boat should float on water, but a tank should sink. There may be some fundamental work on protocols for interacting with terrain here.

• Simulated Voice Radio: Work on simulating the transmission of voice radio in the virtual environment, simulating the effects of limited range, interference, and fade-out. I think this would be a relatively small project; the hardest part would be integrating it with the entity programs.

• Porting and Heterogeneity: Port the PARADISE testbed from the IBM AIX platform to SGI machines. This should be fairly easy. Also, port the PARADISE testbed from the IBM AIX platform to PC's. This could be more difficult. Once the port is complete, explore the implications of heterogeneous hardware in the PARADISE environment. How must the architecture be modified (or have we done a good enough job?) to support different types of machines simultaneously?

Dynamic Terrain

In a distributed simulation, users interact not only with one another but also with the environment, or terrain. For example, a tank leaves tracks in the ground and a missile creates a crater in the ground.

We need a student to explore how dynamic terrain can be created, updated, and managed. Our approach is to treat the terrain like any other entity insofar as possible. The terrain has unique characteristics, however: it is big and effectively exists everywhere, and it undergoes structural change. A dynamic terrain implementation should be added to the PARADISE testbed.

This project requires the student to explore how the terrain database is represented (i.e. polygons, elevations, etc.), how updates are stored, how the terrain is paged to simulators as they move about, how updates are propagated to interested hosts, how persistence and reliability are guaranteed, and other issues. The student will probably need to gain some background in databases and graphics.

Miscellany

• Multiple fidelity (update channel) objects

• Objects with multiple (articulated) parts

• Objects with dynamic structure

• Better-behaved clouds

• Fog, rain, wind, etc.

• Checkpoint, tracing, and replay

• Variable time rate

• Smoke plumes

• Security