LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: MrJ <9405581j@lux.levels.unisa.edu.au>
  To  : linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au" <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>, "'Alan Kennington' <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 11:16:18 +1030

RE: AKSL software

the GNOME project has some interesting software in developement:

http://www.gnome.org/applist/view.phtml?name=Guppi&prevpage=listrecent.phtml?numlist=

----------
From: 	Alan Kennington[SMTP:Alan.Kennington@dsto.defence.GOV.AU]
Sent: 	Monday, 02 November, 1998 19:43
To: 	linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
Cc: 	Alan Kennington
Subject: 	AKSL software

LinuxSA persons interested in simulation software:

After meditating on this matter since 1988, I've finally decided
(after viewing the document http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/halloween.html)
that it may be a good idea to try to get a high-quality simulation
environment developed within linux/GNU -- _if_ it hasn't been done yet!

Please let me know if I'm years behind other people's work in this area.
And then I'll just drop the idea.

First, over the last 10 years, I've ben writing and maintaining
simulation support software in C++ (now some 27,000 lines),
which may be viewed at
http://dartagnan.maths.adelaide.edu.au:8080/~akenning/README.html
by clicking on the appropriate pointers.

The documentation has been sufficient for several people
(in various cities in Australia and also in Malaysia!) to run
simulations on Unix boxes. But the documentation needs a lot of work
still.

Using this AKSL simualtion software, I've written simulations of
DQDB (IEEE 802.6), ATM, frame relay, HF radio network,
and GSM mobile networks. I've also used it for various sorts of
animations, and other people have used it to develop simulations
which interact directly with the real world (e.g. video over ATM).

Therefore I'm quite confident that this simulation library is a
good starting point for a really good GNU/linux simulation environment
-- if there isn't one already.

The simulation philosophy adopted was that

-   no wierd new language would be used, just C++
    [if you are familiar with simulation environments, you will know
    what I mean by wierd, non-standard programming languages]
    This implies that there should be little difficulty in
    transferring the simualtion code into the real system,
    e.g. into application software.

-   high re-usability, in the sense that if someone writes
    an ethernet simulator and someone else writes a PC simulator,
    and someone else writes an ISDN simulator, then you should be
    able to plug these together without great difficulty,
    instead of having to write the whole integrated simulator
    from scratch.

-   network seamlessness, in the sense that if someone wrote
    an ethernet card simulator and put it on the web, then
    you should be able to incorporate it into your simulations at
    run time by just giving the URL.
    [this concept was worked out in detail long _before_ the html
    protocol and web servers became available]

-   high run-time efficiency. This is achieved by compiling to object code,
    and deciding heaps of things at compile-time rather than
    at run-time as some environments do.

Unfortunately (but predictably), a commercial simulation environment
came along a couple of years after I developed the first
versions of the AKSL library. That system adopted many (but not all)
of the design criteria of AKSL, and makes __huge__ amounts of money,
like charges 25 times the price of a PC per year for a licence.
That system should have a GNU competitor!

Please let me know if:

1.  It's all been done before.
2.  You think you would like to do development of this sort of thing.
3.  You think I should approach it differently -- like talk about it
    in some other forum initially.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
Check out the LinuxSA web pages at http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject




-- 
Check out the LinuxSA web pages at http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject