YetiSim Blog

This week I am attending the SCS Spring Sim ‘08 conference in Ottawa, Ontario. This is the first conference I have attended, and tomorrow Deborah and I are presenting a research poster on YetiSim. Along with the poster, a short paper on YetiSim has been published with the proceedings of the conference.   I have been to Ottawa a few times, so I wasn’t too excited to see the city, but next year the conference is in San Diego which would be neat.

I attended a talk by Dr. Rajkumar Buyya about GRID computing and GRIDSim.  I remember looking at GRIDSim some time ago, when I originally researched GRID and Beowulf simulators.  It is implemented in Java, so the performance of the simulator likely will not be very efficient, at least if it is a discrete event simulation with a large number of entities.  I also attended the keynote talk, but it was early in the morning and I needed some coffee (apparently in short supply here).  The keynote talk focused on psychology experiments with the effectiveness of HUDs on reaction time.  Unfortunately not quite in my interests, but there were some pretty pictures, and it would be neat to play with a helicopter simulator just to see how quickly I crash it.

This afternoon I had a break from proceedings, since there weren’t any papers that looked very interesting (and my attention span is really short I’m afraid, unless the topic is super interesting).  I met representatives of CAE today during my break.  Their research and products seem to be inline with the type of simulation work I am doing.  It looks like it would be an interesting place to work for a summer, but I wouldn’t sign a contract which limited my ability to work on YetiSim, so it wouldn’t be likely.  I also met some people from Concurrent  who gave me a Tux penguin toy (which I like very much).  They are doing a real-time Linux operating system, but they do some type of electronics simulation that gave me an interesting idea.  Really what they do, is allow simulated electronic inputs or something to be part of the simulation (sorry, attention span is skipping some of the details there).  But anyhew, YetiSim could easily be extended to receive input from virtual devices or real ones for simulation by allowing the state executions to be an input.  Wouldn’t be that bad to do actually, and might still benefit from parallel processing.

I got a lot of interest  in YetiSim today, and sat down with professors from Dalhousie and Victoria University.  I met a few people who are interested in health care simulation, Deborah’s field of research.  We went over YetiSim in great detail for about an hour and a half.  It would be awesome if I could get funding for the summer to just work on YetiSim full time, there seems to be some excitement about it.  We’ll see tomorrow when we do our actual presentations what the interest level is.  I hope that people will be as excited about YetiSim as I am.  I’ve actually been surprised how interested people are in something like YetiSim which is open source and all about performance.  It’s very encouraging.

I met Dr. Buyya, which I discussed a bit earlier.  A very nice man from the quick conversation I had with him, I’d like to spend some time with him to just discuss ideas.  I actually had considered doing my masters with him at one point, maybe I still might who knows.  I would love to study in Australia.  An interesting conference overall, not enough food though, or social events to mingle.  Lots of ideas and energy floating around though.