HLA RTI Performance in High Speed LAN Environments

This paper presents recent results concerning the realization of HLA RTIs in high-speed LAN environments. Specifically, the UK-RTI and a second, simplified RTI implementation were realized on a cluster of Sun workstations using Myrinet, a gigabit, low-latency interconnection switch developed by Myricomm Inc. The performance of these implementations was compared with the UK-RTI and version 1.3 of the DMSO RTI using UDP and TCP/IP on an Ethernet LAN. The Myrinet implementations utilize a software package called RTI-Kit that implements group communication services and time management algorithms on high-speed interconnection hardware. Results of this study demonstrate the technical feasibility and performance that can be obtained by exploiting high performance interconnection hardware and software in realizing HLA RTIs. In particular, in most experiments the RTIs using Myrinet achieved one to two orders of magnitude improvement in performance relative to the UK-RTI and DMSO version 1.3 RTI using UDP/TCP in attribute update latency time, and the wallclock time required to perform a time management cycle. 1 Work completed while on leave at the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, Malvern, UK. © British Crown Copyright 1998/DERA Published with the permission of the Controller of Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office.