Federation Grid
Federation Grid leverages existing standards and technologies to create a scalable collaborative grid for the development and deployment of simulations and games.
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Project Description
Emergency management is an increasing concern for Canada's governments and military. Emergency managers, now more than ever, need tools and training in order to react quickly and effectively to threats and environmental disasters on Canadian soil. MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA) is leading a research team that will deliver those tools and training.
The project, known as FedGrid (Federation Grid), will leverage existing military standards and technologies to build a scalable platform for a collaborative grid that can support a wide-range of distributed simulations, including emergency management training, military training, high-end image processing and cost-effective computer game development. The new tools and architecture built on the project will make it easier for software designers and domain experts across the country to collaborate online to build software and to tailor simulations, better, quicker, and cheaper.
MDA, an information solutions firm in Richmond, BC, has teamed up with Vancouver-based software developer Magnetar Games Corp to develop the infrastructure and simulation technology for building the emergency management trainer. The university partners - Carleton University, the University of Ottawa, and the University of British Columbia - are supporting the project with infrastructure research and facilities to host an emergency management demonstration. The National Defence research partner, DRDC-Valcartier, is providing the data sets for performing demonstration and is responsible for evaluating how well the simulation showcases the technology.
CANARIE, a non-profit corporation responsible for developing Canada's advanced Internet infrastructure - CAnet 4 - as well as funding for advanced applications development, has provided $1.9 million toward the total project cost of $2.6 million. The project team will be conducting an EM simulation of a bomb blast in downtown Montreal on Tuesday 12th December. EM roles will be played by team partners from MDA, Magnetar Games, UBC, Carleton University, and DRDC Valcartier.
Project Partners
Federation Grid involved the participation of many different partners.MDA
MDA is the lead participant responsible for project management including defining the work breakdown structure, work package definitions, the monitoring of progress, and planning to ensure the success of the project. MDA has a long history of successful large project development. It has a business area focused on defence systems and currently sells military training systems. In addition, MDA has a number of computational-intensive image processing algorithms that can exploit the FedGrid infrastructure. MDA is a funded participant with responsibility for:
- Project management.
- Assist Magnetar in developing the Federation Grid infrastructure.
- Plan and develop the emergency management simulation.
Magnetar Games Corporation
Magnetar Games is a participant leading the development of the Federation Grid. This infrastructure is directly applicable to their business, specifically game infrastructure for MMOG (Massive Multiplayer Online Games). FedGrid will allow Magnetar to broaden and deepen its technology offerings and its experience in standards-based modelling and simulation. FedGrid will allow Magnetar's customers to reuse models and thereby be quicker to the market with new games at a lower cost. The ability to provide grid computing keeps this company at the leading edge of suppliers to the game industry. Magnetar Games is a funded participant with responsibility for:
- Develop the Federation Grid infrastructure.
- Deploy a Federation Grid data center
- Develop HLA runtime infrastructure for Microsoft Windows Communication Framework and Sun Java
- Integrate gateway technology for web Flash and XBAP clients
- Develop the Extensible Scene Graph (XSG) as a standards based pervasive virtualization technology
- Develop client architecture and user interface designs for the emergency management demo.
- Develop HLA infrastructure and federates which support the emergency management demo.
- Develop web portals to promote Federation Grid technology
- Design and develop Quest web based collaborative tools for non programmer authoring of games and simulations
- Explore integration of major third party services including the Multiverse MMOG into Federation Grid using HLA and XSG
DRDC-Valcartier
DRDC is a participant assisting in the development of the training simulation. This group will benefit by technical diffusion from university-based research. This participant is not funded and has responsibility for:
- Assist in scenario definition and the data collection and analysis approach.
- Assist in data generation, specifically the 3-D scenes of downtown Montreal.
- Assist in evaluating the demonstration.
Carleton University
Carleton University is a funded participant conducting research in these principal areas:
- Eastern terminus for the FG EM simulation testing and formal demonstration
- Discrete Event System Specification Interoperability
- Eclipse Federate and Eclipse FOM Manager
- SIP-Enabled RTI
- Eclipse-Based Conference Participant
- EM Chat application
- Model and service interface for VO formation and dissolution
- Grid-enabling HLA components
- Grid security patterns
University of British Columbia
UBC is a funded participant conducting research in these principal areas:
- Web Services Infrastructure
- Interest Management
- Ubicomp Integration Framework
- Resource and Service Discovery
- Wall-to-Wall and P2P Streaming
- Intelligent Agents in a Multi-Agent Simulation.
- Intelligent Agent Interaction with Prospect Theoretic Decision Makers.
- Security for Shared Resources
- Ontology Community Service
- UCLP/CA*Net4 Network Connection and Demonstration Support
University of Ottawa
The University of Ottawa is a funded participant conducting research in these principal areas:
- Large-Scale Distributed Simulation
- Study and classify existing data distribution management techniques for large-scale simulation systems
- Study and investigate a suitable Grid-based DDM for large-scale simulation systems. Design a JavaiXML user interface for DDM and RTI input/output
- Study and investigate the effect of aggregation and disaggregation of federates with relation to various Grid-based DM techniques
- Study and investigate suitable DDM service management within the HLA/RTI
- New Interface Paradigm for the
FedGrid Emergency Response Simulation
- Investigate a new interface paradigm for the FedGrid emergency response VR simulation
- Investigate a suitable architecture for tele-haptics FedGrid simulations over HLA-RTI
- Investigate the time-delay compensation approach for interactivity over TiDecI
- Web Services Composition
- Investigate a new Incentives Mechanism for Service Oriented Architecture
- Classify existing Web services composition techniques
- Study and investigate a suitable architecture for real-time web service composition techniques
About CANARIE
CANARIE, Canada’s advanced Network development organization, is a not-for-profit corporation supported by its members, project partners and the Federal Government. Since 1993, CANARIE has received more that $350 million from the Government of Canada. That funding has been used for the research and implementation of advanced networks and applications that stimulate economic growth and increase Canada’s international competitiveness. CAnet 4 is the fourth generation of Canada’s research and education network. CANARIE’s mission is to accelerate Canada’s advanced network development and use by facilitating the widespread adoption of faster, more efficient networks and by enabling the next generation of advanced products, applications and services to run on them.
