Looking at the replies posted up to now on "New Architecture for Flightgear" and at the "More ideas on dogfighting" postings it seems to me that a crucial common item is "inter process communications" or IPC. There seems to be three main scenarios: a) Flight gear running modular on a multiprocessor/multicore SMP (IPC: perhaps shared memory or kernel message passing eg MPI) b) Flight gear running modular on multiple machines (IPC: perhaps network shared memory-NUMA or network message passing interface) c) Collections of flight gear modules ie aircraft, communicating for a multi-player capability as in conventional ATC situations and dogfighting etc.
(a) and (b) I would think of as intra-flightgear probably running on a local area network and for (b) using any form of network hardware (ethernet,firewire, specialist interconnects etc) whereas (c) is inter-flightgear probably over an external tcp/ip network. It would be simpler if all three could use the same method but the lowest common denominator is tcp/ip or udp/ip and this may not have the performance required for (a) and (b). A lot of work on on inter-communication methods has been done for collections of parallel computers such as Beowulf clusters http://www.beowulf.org/ utilising PVM http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/ and MPI http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/. Some of these are smart enough to "know" processors are on same machine and adapt to usr shared memory whereas they use tcp/ip for interconected machines. A comprehensive literature search may turn up Open Source projects which can be used "as is" or "bent" slightly to suit flightgear requirements. This would save development time!! Here is one interesting article http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds8-3/programming.html cheers Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
