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Virtual war: The army and technology
James Gorbold joins the British Army at its high-tech Land Warfare Centre to see just what the military are doing with the most expensive computer games in the world.
For example, each vehicle simulator pod is driven by several racks of PCs. The simulation itself is run on a dual-processor Xeon SuperMicro server, which informs the server of the vehicle's location on the virtual battlefield, and handles the damage model, fuel consumption and radio communications. This is then fed information from several lower-spec PCs that handle all the I/O commands received from the control devices in the simulation, such as the turret traverse and drivers' steering instructions. A final set of PCs, currently Core 2 Duo-powered Dell machines, then render the virtual world onto the TFT displays that are attached to the vehicles' viewpoints. The number of PCs required to power each simulation varies depending on the complexity of the vehicle being simulated, and can range from half a dozen PCs for a Scimitar to more than a dozen for a Challenger 2. As each of the generic vehicle simulation stations is powered by several PCs, this means that the CATT facility as a whole, including servers, comprises more than 2,000 PCs - significantly more machines that you'll find even at the UK's largest LAN parties.
In conjunction with all the hardware upgrades, the network infrastructure has been upgraded from the proprietary FDDI system to industry-standard Ethernet. Meanwhile, although the core of the virtual battlefield database is still written in Ada, much of CATT is run by standard off-the-shelf APIs and content-generation tools such as 3ds Max. One of my escorts at CATT, a Lockheed Martin UK employee, was due to visit a Royal Logistics Corps base the day after my visit to photograph two new trucks that the British Army wanted to add to the database. These photos would then be sent to the Lockheed Martin US headquarters in Orlando, Florida, to be turned into 3D models.
The future of simulation
While it's unlikely that many (if any) PC gamers will ever have the means to set up a complete CATT-style physical simulation at home, there's an increasing convergence between PC and military simulators.
The reason for this is that, until recently, the military simulation market was dominated by large defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin and SAAB. These companies were good at producing simulators, since they also made the real vehicles, their computer systems and associated software. However, the computer market is no longer driven by huge mega-corporations producing expensive proprietary mainframes and supercomputers, but by gamers, who are demanding increasingly powerful PCs at a low cost. This in turn has provided an opportunity for game industry companies to step in and offer increasingly detailed products to the military. At a hardware level, the cost of PCs has dropped through the floor over the last 25 years, and the military is now able to upgrade its systems more frequently, and at a lower cost. In some cases, this has opened up whole new business opportunities, such as Quantum3D (www.quantum3d.com), an Nvidia partner that specialises in military simulation. Quantum3D's products range from image-generating software to extremely high-end graphics workstations, such as the Independence 2500, which is used to power some military simulators.
