Re: Tasks and Simulation

[BBardin@ADA20.ISI.EDU.UUCP]

In response to your  question  regarding  the  use  of  Ada  to  write
non-real-time simulations of combat engagements, I believe that we can
help.  We have recently developed an Ada package called  Ada_Sim  that
supports  discrete  event  simulation  modeling  directly in Ada.  Ada
tasks are  used  in  the  model  to  represent  software  tasks  in  a
multi-tasking  or  distributed environment, hardware activity, and the
external scenario.

The Ada_Sim package is actually a collection of packages that  provide
future  event  chain  and  simulation  clock  management  as  well  as
functions that support the definition, use and statistic gathering  on
simulation  entities  such  as resources, actions, queues, semaphores,
and tasks.  An application model is then constructed  from  Ada  logic
that  uses  these procedures to simulate the contention for resources,
the passage of time, queuing  of  data,  and  the  synchronization  of
tasks.

Ada_Sim was successfully used to develop a model of an  EW  system  in
support  of  software design issues.  The model consisted of 35 system
tasks and 5 external load tasks.  Statistics during  model  executions
were   gathered   on:    processor   utilization,   operating   system
utilization, application task utilization, queue sizes and delays, and
the impact of different application priority schema.

Any comments or questions are welcome, you can contact me on  the  net
via BBardin at Ada20.ISI.EDU or by telephone.

Barry McArdle Hughes Aircraft Co., Ground  Systems  Group,  POB  3310,
MS618/P215, Fullerton, Ca 92634.  (714) 732-3762
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