Rick Kazman
Department of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario
Abstarct
Flight simulation has always been an application which needed to be distributed in order to be computable at all. Although examples of single-processor flight simulators exist [2] they are typically simulators of low fidelity, often games. True flight simulation has extremely high fidelity demands: the virtual environment which the simulator creates must be as life-like as possible in order to train the aircrew as effectively as possible. Even in simulators created 30 years ago, distribution was utilized:
Linear computing operations, such as summation, integration and sign changing, are performed by d.c. operational amplifiers, consisting of high gain drift correct amplifiers with appropriate resistive or capacitive feedback networks. There are 150 such operational amplifiers . . . The non-linear part of the computing equipment consists of servo-multipliers, electronic time-division multipliers, and diode function generators. In addition, forty-eight high gain amplifiers are available for special computing circuits which may be built up for each simulation . . . The individual computing amplifiers, potentiometers, multipliers, etc. are connected together to form the overall computation network by means of a central patching panel, having over 2300 terminations.
Although the effects produced by such a simulator are primitive by today’s standards, many of the principles behind the system’s architecture have not changed. A single computer typically cannot provide the functionality and/or the raw computation power to serve a flight simulator, or if it could, it would be horrendously expensive. This situation is not likely to change: as computer power increases, so do our demands and so does the complexity of the air vehicles being simulated. Thus, a number of computers were “patched” together through a patch panel 30 years ago in order to create a flight simulator; today, they would typically be connected through a fibre-optic network.
Source & Download PDF: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f652/c381876ad9a2d77ce89aa22a82a99e958ea6.pdf
