The High Level Architecture (HLA) specification (IEEE 1516) defines several Data Distribution Management (DDM) services to forward events generated on update regions to a set of subscription regions. For example, consider a simulation of vehicles moving over a two-dimensional terrain. In this case, each vehicle may be interested in events happening inside its area of interest (e.g., its field of view), that might be approximated with a rectangular region centered at the vehicle position. This kind of problem also arises in the context of Massively Multiplayer Online Games, where the game engine must send game updates only to players that might be affected, in order to reduce computation cost and network traffic.
Unfortunately, many solutions employed for the Data Distribution Management service of HLA are either inefficient, or can only partially be parallelized. In the last years, we have developed two different solutions that are described in the corresponding research papers.
A novel parallel extension of the Sort Based Matching algorithm, whose sequential version is considered among the most efficient solutions to the DDM problem.
The Interval Tree Matching (ITM) algorithm for computing intersections among d-rectangles. ITM is based on a simple Interval Tree data structure, and exhibits an embarrassingly parallel structure.