A considerable amount of effort over the last twenty years has been devoted to speeding up the execution of large-scale discrete event simulation programs through the use of parallel and/or distributed processing techniques. Notable successes have been made, and this technology is finally, albeit slowly, beginning to make its way into the general simulation community.
In approximately the same time frame, a considerable amount of effort in the Department of Defense has been concerned with developing large-scale, geographically distributed simulations to create synthetic environments. To date, work in the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) community has been focused on training military personnel. DIS has had an enormous impact in the DoD simulation and modeling community.
Until now, work in these two communities has progressed largely independently of each other. However, the technologies from these two communities are now beginning to converge. This convergence brings about new opportunities that can dramatically affect the way simulations are developed, and applied to solving real-world problems, both in the commercial and military sectors. In this presentation I will discuss some of the ramifications and technological issues that come into play as technologies from the DIS and high performance discrete event simulation communities are brought to bear in modeling large-scale systems.