Richard Fujimoto, 319 CoC Bldg., fujimoto@cc.gatech.edu, 404/894-5615

Office hours: MW 11:00-12:30 or by appointment

MWF 10:05-10:55 PM, Room 101 CCB

Starting late February, (approximately Feb. 25), the Friday lecture will be replace by weekly individual or group meetings to discuss project work. The Friday lectures will resume the last two weeks of the semester for student pr esentations.

R. Fujimoto, Parallel and Distributed Simulation Systems. John Wiley & Sons, 2000 (required).

This book should be available from the bookstore. It was published only recently, so there may be a slight delay (a week or two) before it is available.

A general background in operating systems (processes, concurrency issues, semaphores, etc.) is assumed. An undergraduate course in operating systems should suffice. Programming assignments and projects will require software d evelopment in C and/or C++. No prior knowledge of simulation or parallel or distributed computing is assumed.

Required work includes (1) homework assignments spanning (approximately) the first six weeks, intended to familiarize you with the software available for the course; (2) a course project spanning the remainder of the semester ; and (3) three in-class quizes (scheduled for 2/14, 3/15, and 4/12). Each quiz will count for 15% of the final grade, and the project will count for 40%. The homeworks account for the remaining 15%. A list of possible projects will be distributed later i n the semester, or you are free to come up with your own (which must be approved in advance).

A computer account will be created for each of you on the machines in the SGI laboratory to complete the homework assignments and project.

You may take this course for undergraduate or graduate level credit. Both versions of the course will have the same lectures, homework assignments, and quizes. Projects for undergraduates will largely be software development efforts. Projects for graduate students must be research oriented, and typically will require experimentation (requiring software development to create the experiments). Research projects are intended to emulate MS or PhD thesis work, and potentially coul d result in results that might be published in an academic conference. All projects will require an oral presentation at the end of the semester.

This course is concerned with the implementation of simulation systems on parallel or distributed computing systems for analytic or virtual environment applications. The emphasis will be on discrete event simulations. After s ome introductory materials, the course is roughly divided into two parts. The first is concerned with the execution of simulations on distributed computers to create virtual environments, e.g., for training or gaming applications. The second is concerned with parallel/distributed execution of analytic simulation models, e.g., to analyze systems.