Military reconstructive simulation in the cloud to aid battlefield excavations

Abstract

Archaeological studies on battlefields may see great benefits from simulated military engagements: simulations help testing hypotheses based on historical data and may also help with validating methodologies used on the site. Such methods, however, require high-performance computing expertise and considerable computational power. With the emergence of on-demand computing instances in the cloud, distributed computations have become available to technically every organization or individual. This puts large-scale battlefield simulations within the reach of archaeologists, and the cloud paradigm also lowers the required technological expertise, potentially leading to a more widespread adoption of such simulation methods.