The PRIME Research
Parallel Real-time Immersive network Modeling Environment

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news

[10/20/06] PRIME 1.0.1 Has Been Released.

The update includes a more efficient message-passing support for distributed simulation in SSF. Also, a new and better implementation of the fluid network model is included in SSFNet.

[9/14/06] Talk at University of Colorado, Boulder.

Jason Liu went to CU-Boulder to present recent work of PRIME research.

[8/29/06] PRIME 1.0.0 Has Been Released.

Please go to the Download page to obtain the latest source code.

[8/24/06] PRIME Web Site Has Finally Arrived.

Although still under heavy construction, the PRIME research finally has its own public home site. More content will be created as time progresses.

[8/7/06] Talk at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Jason Liu went for an invited talk at the Discrete Simulation Science group (CS-5) at LANL on the PRIME project.

Overview

The success of advancing technologies critical to designing future-generation high-performance global networks and reliable distributed applications hinges on the available tools that can effectively prototype, test, and analyze new ideas. The goal of the PRIME research project is to investigate fundamental technologies that enable real-time large-scale network simulations and to develop a real-time immersive network simulation environment.

Real-time network simulation combines the advantages of both simulation and emulation by running simulation models that interact with the physical world. Real-world distributed applications and network services can run together with the simulator that operates in real time. Real packets are injected into the simulation system and subject to the simulated network conditions computed as a result of both real and virtual traffic traversing the network and competing for network resources.

Immersive large-scale network simulation requires that the simulation not only capture important characteristics of the target global network, but also support seamless interactions with distributed applications in real time. For someone operating a network, the behavior of the immersive virtual network should not be distinguished from that of a physical network.

Current research topics include:

• Hybrid network traffic models for real-time simulation. This research is to allow the simulation to choose among models with different modeling representations and with variable computing requirements during run-time.

• Network immersion techniques. The research is to provide an emulation infrastructure that facilitates scalable, flexible, and effortless integration of distributed applications and real-time network simulation.

• Alternative computing platforms for network simulation. In particular, we investigate GPU co-simulation techniques that exploit the computing resource of graphics processors, which are almost omnipresent on today's desktop computers and become more powerful than CPUs. Certain numerical computations, such as the network background traffic calculation, can be offloaded to the graphics hardware, so that the CPUs can concentrate on more critical tasks for real-time simulation.

The end product of our research is an immersive network simulation environment, a system encompassing both hardware and software components that one can use to study and prototype network applications.

Support

This research is supported in part by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (CNS-0546712).