Development of A Runtime Infrastructure for Large-Scale Distributed Simulations

With the development of distributed modeling and simulation, it is necessary for the RTI to support large-scale applications. However, many RTIs can not support large-scale distributed simulations with more than 100 federates very well nowadays. StarLink+ is an RTI developed according to the IEEE 1516 standard, which can be used for large-scale simulations with thousands of federates. Great innovations are made in StarLink+, such as its architecture and inner implementation technologies. This paper presents the two-level architecture in StarLink+. The unique architecture has the advantages of both central architecture and distributed architecture. To improve the performance much more for large-scale simulations, two important technologies, i.e. multiple threads and data packing, are adopted in StarLink+. In addition, this paper explains the efficient advancing mechanism in time management and discusses the large-scale experiments with thousands of federates in StarLink+.